Space suits

The gloves of the first American astronauts had small red lights on the first two fingers. If the cabin lights failed, the pilot could still read his instruments. Each Mercury astronaut had three suits, two for flight and one for training.

A space suit is a sealed garment that holds air around the body where there is almost none. Early space writers borrowed from diving. In Tsiolkovsky's Greenhouses in Orbit (1917), the Russian word he uses, skafandr, then meant a diving suit; his travelers wear these suits to visit a greenhouse whose thin air is fit only for plants. In 1929 Herman Potočnik, writing as Hermann Noordung, described a stiff metal suit with a polished outside to hold in heat, a backpack carrying oxygen, a radio, and small hand-held thrusters for moving about.

Real suits grew out of high-altitude flying. The Mercury suit, worn from 1961 to 1963, was a version of a Navy pressure suit made by the B. F. Goodrich Company. It weighed 20 pounds and was made of nylon and rubber coated with aluminum. It was only a backup. The cabin kept the pilot alive, and the suit would fill with oxygen if the cabin lost pressure. A NASA fact sheet of the time noted the main difficulty. Even a little air pumped into a suit made the cloth as stiff as sheet metal. In 1952 suit makers made a key advance: joints built on airtight rotating bearings.

Working outside was harder still. The Soviet cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov walked in space on March 18, 1965. On June 3, 1965, Edward White left Gemini IV in a suit made by the David Clark Company, joined to the spacecraft by a hose and tether. In June 1966 Eugene Cernan, on Gemini IX-A, found he could barely hold his body in place; he tired quickly, and his faceplate fogged. For Apollo, NASA tested three companies' suits in June 1965 and that September chose the International Latex Corporation's, with a backpack life-support system from Hamilton Standard.

On Skylab, suits became work clothes for repairs. On June 7, 1973, Charles Conrad and Joseph Kerwin went outside to free a jammed solar panel. Kerwin struggled for more than half an hour, his pulse reaching 150, until he shortened his tether so that he could brace himself.