As a certified space cadet I have read dozens of books about the history of space exploration and manned space flight, many more on aviation and astronomy. (I own a book, for example, called "Eject! The Complete History of U.S. Aircraft Escape Systems. Actually, it's pretty interesting.)
Virtually all of these books, excepting Mailer's "Of a Fire on the Moon," of course, were written by the anointed for the choir. They focus narrowly, or not too broadly, anyway, on a specific subject and the straightforward tangents of that subject. Michael de Monchaux's "Spacesuit - Fashioning Apollo" was not written for this audience, and the difference is compelling and fascinating. De Monchaux is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.
Put succinctly, "Spacesuit - Fashioning Apollo" is the history of the spacesuit as a technology, specifically the Apollo spacesuit. To anyone who has explored the history of any technology - the photocopier, cell phone towers, bar codes, VCRs, etc., etc. - the gist that emerges quickly and throughout is how far back in time are the beginnings, and how divergent are the seminal paths that eventually merge to create this new thing. The beginnings of the Apollo spacesuit reach back to a Russian Jewish immigrant born in 1901, Abram Spanel. Spanel started the International Latex Corporation (ILC), better known as Playtex. Yep, the spacesuits that allowed moon-walking astronauts to survive were made by master seamstresses who had once made bras and girdles. Just imagine how this went over with the fighter jock personalities at NASA.
But moreover, this book is a cultural treatise about clothing the human body. NASA basically did not want the suit ILC proposed, which was an actual garment. Most in NASA and the aerospace industry wanted to contain astronauts in hard, rigid suits (cans, really), not dress them in fabric. And yet, once all requirements were considered, ILC's concepts were chosen.
Rather than simply dissect how the Apollo spacesuit came to be, de Monchaux explores a spectrum of cultural powers and movements that made such a device possible, but not necessarily inevitable. The narrative explains that the only way to develop a spacesuit that worked fully was to maintain the round peg of the human body as the square-hole concepts of engineering and bureaucracy evolved to accommodate that concept. The concepts for rigid suits came up short. Regarding Apollo, they came up short rather completely.
This book is also an expose of the Cold War. Informed and inquisitive people have always known there were activities our democracy pursued that were far removed from our consuming, post-war suburban lives of ease and abundance. Even for the well educated, though, that knowledge tended to be cursory without the specific pursuit of a particular interest. Presented here both explicitly and implicitly is a window into the myriad of secret (or at least never publicized) programs, as well as the almost open-ended funding that paid for them.
Further, this books is about The Sixties, perhaps the most American decade in a century that was already America's. As de Monchaux tells the story, the Apollo suit is really emblematic of a conterculture. ILC's informal engineers were self taught, with little if any college experience, details that rankled the quantitative, degree-strewn POV of NASA and aerospace bureaucracies. Although from a generation well before Woodstock, ILC engineers found implicitness out of explicitness, while also finding ways to satisfy the calculations and methodologies the bureaucracies needed as much as demanded.
There is no doubt the initial purpose of Apollo, in 1961, was political, both domestically and internationally. As de Monchaux writes, "From the perspective of Kennedy's knowledge of the media's power in the cold war, the entire effort to go to the moon should be rightly understood as an elaborate apparatus for the production of a single television image. Kennedy approved plans to go to the moon because he - and perhaps particularly and peculiarly he - knew that the single image, however arduously achieved, could be magnified and extended globally, and, in an instant, change the world." There is also little doubt that for many, many space enthusiasts within NASA, the aerospace industry and the general world populace, by July 20, 1969 Apollo had evolved into an almost Renaissance-like quest in American culture that was at least transcendent. After all, fighter jocks don't become artists (Alan Bean) or poet/philosophers (Edgar Mitchell) without a life-altering experience.
Of all the pieces of equipment an astronaut needs, his or her spacesuit is in many ways the most important, considering the failure of a suit's most basic concept will lead to an agonizing and quick death. De Monchaux has structured his book to reflect the 21 layers that were sewn and bonded together to make the Apollo suit. In a very real sense, the suit was not only composed of 21 layers of nylon and mylar and teflon, but also layers of imagination, determination and temerity - the same sort of audacity that pushed our ancestors out of the liquid realm of the sea into the much thinner fluid of our atmosphere, that propelled us into that sky, and then beyond.
More than any system-within-the-system that emerged from this project, the Apollo spacesuit was likely the most incongruous - intuitive, not easily quantifiable, perhaps a genuine synthesis of art and science. How fitting that this piece of equipment preserved nakedness as much as could be (skinny dipping in the universe, if you will), and that it was the result not so much of if-then thinking as in asking "what if?"
