A new book by frequent SFI visitor Nicholas de Monchaux, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), is the story of the A7L spacesuit worn on the surface of the moon, made by Playtex.
The suit was made of 21 layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles.
The book tells this story in detail, but also a much larger story, touching on Dior, JFK, Cyborgs, and 18th-century ballooning.
The result, in the publisher's words, is "about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario."
Nicholas de Monchaux is an assistant professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California. Spacesuit has its origins in an SFI public lecture he gave in 2002, and it was developed during several subsequent visits to SFI in 2003, 2005, and 2008.
Read more at the book's website
Listen to an interview on NPR's Science Friday (March 25, 2011)
Read the Science News article (March 26, 2011)
Read the Wall Street Journal article (April 2, 2011)
Read the Boston Globe article (April 26, 2011)