Today's crosspost is by Nicholas de Monchaux, author of "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo" and originally posted to the MIT Press Reader on April 9.
The Bra-and-Girdle Maker That Fashioned the Impossible for NASA
By Nicholas de Monchaux
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| Apollo 8 crew is photographed posing on a Kennedy Space Center (KSC) simulator in their space suits. From left to right are: James A. Lovell Jr., William A. Anders, and Frank Borman. Image Credit: NASA |
In 1966, when seamstresses at the International Latex Corporation arrived at its new Apollo Suit shopfloor in Frederica, Delaware, they were essentially “taught to sew again from scratch.” And for good reason: Compared to the company’s bras and girdles, the craftsmanship needed to fashion a spacesuit was, in every sense, out of this world.
At the same time that ILC’s seamstresses were being asked to meet unprecedented precision standards, they were denied traditional tools, such as fastening pins used to maintain sewing accuracy. To a garment whose reliability depended on an impermeable rubber bladder, mechanical aids like pins were an inherently risky proposition.
The most valued seamstresses were those like Roberta Pilkenton, who could sew together the outermost layer of the Apollo suit, the Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment (TMG). Pilkenton crafted the TMG’s 17 concentric layers, with hundreds of yards of seams, without a single tool except her own guiding fingers.
Read more at
Read what Lara Kearney has to say about NASA's Artemis spacesuit, built by Axiom Space, at
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