Spacesuit

What Hacker News says

1. IsamuDec 2018
   I highly recommend the book:

   Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux

   >How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.

   https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/spacesuit

   It has an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how Playtex succeeded where other contractors failed, how they were almost cut out of the deal anyway, and ended up being awarded the contract as a subcontractor to another company that was able to provide the necessary government-compliant documentation.

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2. chernevikOct 2013
   For a truly outstanding book on the history of the design and manufacture of the space suits, see "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo" by Nicholas de de Monchaux. It touches on interface as an aspect of the problem, and the industrial process of making and validating a proper space suit.

   It turns out that making a space suit is a really hard problem -- and that "obvious" solutions, like hard jointed hard bodies, don't work. One of the keys to getting the suits was the sewing skills of the seamstresses, who sometimes had to stitch to tolerances smaller than the needles they worked with.

   I don't remember the book as well as I like, I think another theme was the necessity of going outside NASA's manufacture and documentation protocols because the handmade manufacture process at the center of it all wouldn't fit. For all of NASA's emphasis on planning and documentation and process, the equipment actually on the astronauts was essentially an enormous craft project of hundreds of dedicated people.

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