When selecting photos to post with a piece about “Fashioning Apollo,” Nicholas de Monchaux’s book documenting American spacesuit design, I found myself seduced by photos of the earliest prototypes, from the 1940’s and 1950’s, which look less like costumes or uniforms than like appliances.  Part Tin Man and part Michelin Man, they used metal and hard plastics to surround pilots and astronauts with impermeable shells.  And yet they aren’t like Medieval suits of armor, which enhance and dignify the body’s proportions.  They’re more like exoskeletons superimposed over the structure of the body.  They turn men into robots, into cyborgs.

It wasn’t really until the moon-landing Apollo mission in 1969 that NASA began to construct spacesuits from a sandwich of pliable fabrics, which is how they’re made today.  It was necessary because the hard, structured suits didn’t provide adequate mobility and comfort.  In the end the structure of the body couldn’t be improved.

Nicholas de Monchaux, an architect and academic who’s written a book on the Apollo spacesuits, wrote a bittersweet farewell to the American space program in the Times.  He sees it as the inevitable end to an arm of the industrial-military complex that’s outserved its purpose.  But he’s nostalgic about the Apollo missions which, although pointedly political, embodied genuine heroism and curiosity.  He recalls handling a spacesuit in the archives at Cape Canaveral, one worn by an astronaut walking the lunar surface, and finding moon dust in the creases.

In the story of how the Apollo spacesuits were developed De Monchaux sees an ideal blend of American ingenuity and determination.  The project engineer for NASA was a former television repair man who recruited seamstresses from Playtex to stitch together the twenty-one layers of materials, including lycra and teflon, that were required.  The garments (or are they appliances?) were fashioned iteratively, in response to individual technical problems.  They didn’t end up looking what NASA wanted them to look like – slick, metallic shells – but they did the job and have become iconic.  De Monchaux  points to the spacesuit project as a model for American business.  The pragmatic design method, with isn’t governed by an idea of what something should be, certainly appeals to me.  It’s efficient, allows for innovation, and doesn’t fetishize appearances.  I don’t know if it’s a realistic model for all industries, but there are certainly lessons for architects here.  Sometimes tinkering is the best way.