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.