When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits crafted by seamstresses taken from the assembly-line of Playtex, maker of bras and girdles: This book is the story of that suit.
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© Nicholas de Monchaux
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On July 20, 1969, the bodies of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were protected from a lunar vacuum by only twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex"—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics. 
After the introduction, the first subsequent layer involves the discovery—both intellectually and physically—of “space” as an environment hostile to man. Occurring in the late eighteenth century, discoveries of mankind’s limitations were tied together with an interest in man’s own inner workings, projected to be as machine-like as the clockwork automata that provided a parallel fascination to early aviation. Space became defined, crucially, as the environment we need technology to enter, and survive.
From this backward glance, the next layer serves as a “new look” at the postwar twentieth century. Christian Dior’s fashion innovations of 1947 are used to explore a variety of themes that will be referenced throughout the book: the lessons learned by postwar business from the war effort, the focus on surface culture and the fashion cycle as engineered by a postwar consumer economy, and the onsets of new materials and techniques in the manufacture of daily life.
From the world of couture, the phrase “new look” became shorthand for a range of postwar transformations, not least the changes wrought by President Dwight Eisenhower in the management of postwar defense. Abandoning the standing army, Eisenhower committed the nation to a “New Look in Defense Planning,” which emphasized nuclear technology and close collaboration between the military, industry, and academia. We are all too familiar with the legacy of this “military-industrial complex,” but attention here is given to its particular institutional origins in the Atlas missile program, and the establishment therein of the standards of systems engineering and management that would serve as the institutional infrastructure of the entire Cold War space race.
From the human origins of space-age management, we turn to the humble origins of human protection against altitude, and the birth of the latex pressure suit in the barnstorming aviation culture of the interwar years. Although associated from their origin with futuristic visions, these first high-altitude “space suits” were less technocratic achievements than feats of adaptation. In 1934 such a hand-formed “tire shaped like a man” brought aviator Wiley Post to the limits of the stratosphere.
While primitive suits inspired by Post’s were investigated by the armed forces after World War II, more synthetic notions of man in space gained credence. Notable was the neologism “cyborg,” a man-machine hybrid proposed by Nathan Kline and Manfred Clynes. Clynes, a mathematician and analog computer expert, and Kline, a psychopharmacologist, proposed that instead of carrying an earthlike environment with him, the biochemistry and homeostatic functioning of man should itself be adapted for space travel. Grounded in the same theories of cybernetic control that shaped parallel advances in systems management, the cyborg concept for space exploration was studied intensively before its eventual abandonment in 1966.
Soon came the launch of Sputnik. With the Soviet achievement, the United States accelerated its space efforts, borrowing missiles and management systems from the armed services and hastily adapting high-altitude flight suits to serve in space. In pressure suit design, military green was (literally) sprayed silver, as the iconography of science fiction shaped space flight’s swiftly constructed facade.
Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 spaceflight catalyzed that battlefield of the Cold War known as the space race, the establishing of missile superiority through the launch of man. However, the Soviet bureaucracy that had enabled the feat suppressed vital facts of the flight, including the fact that Gagarin landed only in his spacesuit, parachuting from the unstable Vostok capsule high above the earth. The particular history of spacesuits in the Soviet context is an essential and incongruous contrast to the American epic.
Anticipating the space age, the International Latex Corporation (ILC), known by its consumer brand “Playtex,” conducted basic research on adapting its latex expertise to pressurized suits. Initially ignored, its research gained it center stage in Apollo suit manufacture after startling advances in mobility and comfort.
In the moment of national commitment to Apollo, the artist Richard Hamilton depicted John F. Kennedy in a spacesuit, essentializing his central role in the space race, as well as his mastery of fashion and image. The image reveals an essential truth: Kennedy’s pivotal decision to fund NASA’s lunar effort, and to give it the urgency that shaped Apollo’s realities, can be ascribed as much to the private frailties of his own body as to the oft-photographed facade it inspired.
Instead of physiologically adapting man for space (as the cyborg model proposed), the groundbreaking research of the space age was into the real, and modest, limitations of the unaltered human body. After literally exhaustive tests, these limits were incorporated into NASA’s design systems just as readily as booster thrust or orbital apogees.
While the resulting landing on the moon shaped the visual language of our century, a greater influence arguably belongs to the virtual landscapes first crafted by NASA to allow the extensive simulation and training of lunar landings on the tight Apollo schedule. The race to the moon was a massive exercise in parallel real and simulated realities, from necessary advances in computing technology to the huge twin control rooms in Houston that alternately held real and virtual missions.
In the midst of Apollo’s tense timetable, ILC was fired. In the spring of 1965, many NASA engi-neers, as well as top administrators, favored the military-industrial expertise of the influential Hamilton Standard/United Aircraft Conglomerate, with which ILC had initially been partnered. However, a resulting three-week competition proved the Playtex suit not only better than its military-industrial competitors, but the only suit that could reliably preserve, and extend, human abilities on the moon.
ILC’s subsequent effort was one of adaptation, both physical and organizational. Handmade assemblages of fabric, latex, and nylon were hand-sewn to minute tolerances, and custom-fitted to each astronaut. Indeed, the production of the suits met both physical and institutional barriers within the military-industrial complex, from X-ray scans to uncover errant pins, to a spirited debate on whether and how clothing sizes, as opposed to serial numbers, could be used to describe variations in individual suits.
After 1965, the most serious competitor to the ILC suit for later lunar missions was a hard, one-piece suit manufactured by the stratospherically successful (if ultimately disgraced) corporate conglomerate Litton Industries. Even as they failed to meet the standards for lunar use, the streamlined suits were staged by NASA as the future of space travel through the 1970s.
As the lunar landing was a media event, so was it a feat of broadcast technology—particularly at the most-viewed American news source, CBS. Designed at the same time as Kubrick’s 2001 (and by the same set designer, Douglas Turnbull), the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage incorporated more simulations, asynchronous sequences, and other trappings of modern broadcasts than any other television event of its time. As well as a cultural touchstone, it was the foundation for our contemporary, 24-hour news cycle.
Sharing the sleek geometries of CBS’s soundstage, the alternative suits most beloved of design historians are the AX series of experimental suits developed by NASA’s Ames Research Center. The suits provide important clues to the culture, and contours, that form the most seductive face of the space age.
The visual seduction of space systems leads to another vision of control, provided by the Mission Control Room itself. With its implications and mythologies, the multiscreen environments of Houston offer important clues into the architecture of our own mediated milieu.
These lessons regarding the body in space could be extended to larger architectural contexts through a system of analogy alone. Yet important historical links exist as well. Systems engineers and policymakers of the late 1960s sought to literally apply the lessons of Apollo to the pressing problems of cities. In these efforts they followed not the soft surface of spacesuits, but rather what they understood as the hard truths of systems engineering. And so, as with the cyborg, the subsequent failure of these efforts was as systematic as it was superficial.
A vital part of the 21-layered story of the A7L is provided by the idea of layering itself, and the related strategies of redundancy and interdependence. These qualities, shared by the chemical and physical reality of the A7L’s 21 layers, also turn out to be essential concepts in examining the vital distinctions between natural and manmade complexity, and the qualities of robustness and fragility that define and separate them.
As we face the necessity of transforming our own relationship to our only enduring spaceship--the earth--the lessons of the Apollo spacesuit are particularly essential. As the impact of human civilization on our robust yet fragile planet becomes ever more apparent, we must resist the seeming simplicity of the systems solution (as in recent proposals to “solve” global warming through systematic and global geoengineering”). Much as the ILC A7L created a suitable space for man in the extreme landscape of the moon, so we must carefully—if sometimes radically—fashion a space for ourselves on earth.