When Neil Armstrong took his first step upon the cratered, dusty surface of the moon, the only thing protecting him from battering rays of direct sunlight, space radiation, and shooting lunar particles was the meticulously designed spacesuit he’d donned.
But before Armstrong stepped on the moon, the suit kept making rapid trips back and forth between Delaware and Houston. Experts took it down to Texas in a suitcase for testing before sending it back upstate for fixes – including swapping out a zipper, just two weeks before launch.
Designing the spacesuits that would eventually take humans into the hostile world outside of Earth’s atmosphere was far from easy. The famous suits that Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore to the moon alone underwent multiple transfers of contractor ownership and testing failures before they were finally approved for use.
“It’s very exciting to incorporate new ideas, but designing a spacesuit really is an iterative process. You don’t want to take new, bold, great risks at the expense of human life,” says Cathleen Lewis, curator of International Space Programs and Spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
