Of Spacesuits and Girdles

摘要

A soon to be released movie, based on the 2011 book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux, chronicles the creation of the Apollo AL7 Pressure Garments. The space suits, manufactured for NASA's Apollo 11 mission by the International Latex Corporation (ILC) in Dover, Delaware (see sidebar), were hand-crafted by women who normally sewed girdles and bras. ILC, led by a pair of scrappy salesmen-turned-engineers won NASA's invitation-only "test suit" contest for the Apollo program by producing a super suit drawing on the craft-culture handiwork and expertise of company seamstresses.