August 19, 2024 • 44 mins
A lack of new space suits is going to push back the Artemis Program. Where did space suits come from? What were the early ones like? We look at flight suits up through the early days of Apollo in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Tech Are You? So? Currently, on August twenty six, twenty
twenty four, there is a planned private space launch. SpaceX
(00:28):
is going to be launching four people into orbit, in fact,
a high orbit that human beings have not been in
in quite some time. At least that's the plan. The
four people include Jared Isaacman he is the billionaire founder
of Shift four, Scott Petite, Ann Menon, and Sarah Gillis. Now,
(00:51):
these four private astronauts are planning on going up into
this very high orbit, as I mentioned before. But the
thing I think is really audacious and ambitious is that
the plan is for this to become the first private
space expedition that will include EVAs extra vehicular activities or
(01:14):
space walks in the common parlance. And obviously that's a
huge deal. Like to go out into space with nothing
but a spacesuit to protect you from the fact that,
as I have mentioned many times before in this and
other podcasts, the fact that space is always trying to
kill you. So I think that's a really exciting goal.
(01:38):
And it made me think of an episode that we
published back in twenty twenty one. And because I'm working
on a few other episodes right now that are taking
up a lot of time because there's just a lot
of research to read through, I thought we could revisit
that episode from twenty twenty one. It published August sixteenth,
twenty twenty one, so almost exactly three years ago, just
(02:00):
a little more than that now, and it is titled
Space Suit Evolution I hope you enjoy. Back in March
of twenty twenty, just as we were starting to go
into a work from home phase, I published the episode
(02:21):
about the Artemis program, you know, the one that I
actually ran last week, So if you if you did
miss it back in March twenty twenty, we ran it
again last week. And that might have even been the
very first episode that published after our office closed, because
it published on March sixteenth, twenty twenty, and from a
desk calendar that refuses to change, I know the last
(02:43):
day that most people were in the office was March thirteenth,
twenty twenty. Anyway, in that episode, in case you didn't
listen to the rerun from last week, I described the
goals in the purpose of NASA's Artemis program, which includes
a return to the Moon, and I'm sure that I
mentioned probably moreultiple times that it was an incredibly aggressive goal,
one that I was kind of having trouble seeing NASA
(03:06):
actually achieve. It just seemed like it was too tough
of a thing to do to have it be done
by twenty twenty four. Well, NASA's Office of the Inspector
General has outright said that the twenty twenty four goal
is unachievable because one of the necessary components, that being
a new space suit design, will not be ready until
(03:29):
the spring of twenty twenty five at the earliest. That's
not the only thing that's going to push that program back,
but it's one of the big ones. So I thought
today we would talk a bit about space suits and
their history, and then in our next episode we'll continue
that and talk about the current project to update space
suits and why has it taken so long? Why are
(03:52):
we behind schedule? But to start off with, let's talk
about why you need a space suit out there in
the first place. Now, those of you have been listening
to tech stuff for a while know that I have
a saying, Actually I've got a few of them, but
one of them is space is trying to kill you
all the time. It never rests, and it's always trying
(04:13):
to do it. And there are a lot of ways
that space is doing this. One is that space, like
one of those terrible restaurants, has a complete lack of atmosphere.
I mean, like there's no oxygen out there, so you'd
have nothing to breathe. You could pass out within fifteen
seconds just from that alone. Beyond that, your blood could
boil in space. And that might seem a bit counterintuitive
(04:37):
after all, Like if you're talking about deep space, that's cold, right,
I mean, like if you're talking about deep deep space
you're outside of the Solar System, that would just be
a couple of degrees off from absolute zero, which is
the coldest temperature possible because at absolute zero, there's no
molecular movement at all. Atoms are just kind of perfectly still.
Normally they're vibrating all around the place. So with the
(04:59):
temper sure that cold, you would probably expect to freeze
rather than to boil. I'll come back to the temperature
thing in just a second, but here's the tricky bit. See,
for heat to dissipate, you need to have a way
to transfer it away from one body to another, and
without convection, the heat would tend to stay with you
(05:19):
for a bit. Though you wouldn't stay warm for long.
It's just you wouldn't immediately turn into an ice lolly.
Now that means you'd have enough body heat to boil
off your body fluids and blood. See, the vacuum of
space means there's very very low pressure. Right, there's no
air pressure in space, and that would reduce the boiling
(05:40):
point of the various liquids in your body. And if
they're reduced down low enough, it means that your body
heat alone would be enough to boil off those liquids. Now,
we can totally simulate this on Earth, though preferably not
with a living creature, by putting you a jar of
room temperature water in a vacuum chamber and then sucking
(06:02):
the air out of the chamber, and you can make
water boil at room temperature. This way, the water does
not get hotter or anything like that, it just has
a lower boiling point. Actually, the temperature of your blood
and body fluids would probably go down as it was boiling,
because boiling is an endothermic process and the liquid loses
(06:25):
energy in that process. But we'll move on because we
got a lot of other stuff to cover in this episode.
So those boiling body fluids and the low pressure environment
of space means that all your soft tissues would also
start to swell and expand that would be uncomfortable if
it were just you know, like your skin and maybe
your fat tissue, but it also includes your internal organ
(06:45):
so that's you know, inconvenient at best. Now. I also
mentioned that, as con said in Star Trek two, it's
very cold in space, but that's only part partly true. See,
if you're exposed to sunlight out in outer space, you
could experience temperatures of around one hundred and twenty degrees
(07:07):
celsius or two hundred and forty eight degrees fahrenheit. Now,
if you're out of the sun, if you are in
you know, the shade in space, that temperature would plunge,
though not necessarily all the way down to absolute zero,
you know, because we reserve the super cold stuff or
deep space, but it would go really low, like more
(07:29):
than negative one hundred degrees fahrenheit and that means that
you're going to encounter vastly different temperatures and changes in temperature.
Then you've got tiny particles in space that can be
moving at incredible speeds. These are micro meteoroids, and they
are tiny, but because of momentum, they can pack a
huge punch. See that's that classic equation of momentum is
(07:52):
mass times velocity, So the mass of a some matter
traveling at a specific velocity, which is you know, speed
plus direction. So a tiny particle could have very little mass,
but if it's traveling fast enough, it carries a heck
of a lot of momentum. I mean, that's the principle
behind things like projectile weapons, right. They projectiles don't have
(08:16):
a lot of mass, but they move super fast, so
they have a lot of momentum and thus they can
have a big impact. So you would want to wear
something that could offer at least some protection against that
kind of stuff. Then you've got the various forms of
radiation that you would encounter in space. Here on Earth
we have an atmosphere and a magnetosphere, and together those
(08:36):
provide us with some protection against some of the worst
radiation out there, like gamma radiation and that kind of thing.
But if you're outside of that layer of protection, you
need something to keep you safe from deadly radiation or
else you could suffer some serious consequences from acute burns
to long term health complications like cancer. So obviously, if
(08:57):
you want to visit someplace like the moon, going to
need a special suit to provide protection against the multitude
of ways space is trying to kill you. The suit
needs to be pressurized and allow you to have a
breathable atmosphere inside. The suit needs to be able to
remove carbon dioxide which we exhale so that we can
continue to breathe oxygen and function. It needs to protect
(09:20):
against micro meteoroids at least a little bit. Needs to
keep you at a temperature that's not too hot or
too cold, even as you exert energy to move around
and encounter areas of fluctuating temperatures. Ideally, it also will
include systems that let you communicate with other people. After all,
because space has a shortage of molecules out there, sound
(09:40):
does not travel in space. For sound to travel, molecules
need to vibrate against other molecules. Sound travels through the
air through air pressure, fluctuations and that really, when you
zoom in on, the whole thing would just be air
molecules moving and causing neighboring air molecules to move back
(10:01):
and forth at certain frequencies. And some of those frequencies
we can observe as sound, We can perceive them. Space
does not have that excess of molecules, so there's nothing
to carry sound out there. So we got to have
tech systems built into our suits if we want to
be able to talk to each other or to people
back on Earth. So those are some of the bare
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minimum requirements that you would want from your spacesuit, you know,
assuming you were going to go out into space itself.
The earliest spacesuits were a bit simpler than that because
they weren't intended to be worn outside of a spacecraft.
You know, there was no extra vehicular activity or EVA
in the earliest missions. The spacesuits needed to protect the
(10:46):
people in the spacecraft from other potential threats like maybe
a fire aboard the spacecraft. They actually evolved from flight suits.
So let's start with flight suits and work our way up,
all right, So the earliest aviation outfits were for low
altitude flying, because that's what the aircraft of the day
(11:07):
were capable of so early pilots all the way up
into the World War One era would wear some pretty
simple gear. There were a few attempts at creating official
pilot uniforms and suits in the early days of World
War One, but many pilots chose to go up with
their own gear instead, as the suits weren't necessarily a
good fit I mean, so to speak, not like literally fit,
(11:29):
but like they didn't provide the level of protection against
the cold, for example, that a lot of pilots wanted.
So this was actually approved by the military. I mean,
air combat was so new anyway that it was kind
of the military catching up to technology. Most of the gear,
whether it was provided by the military or the pilots themselves,
(11:51):
was either repurposed or modified motoring gear, so the kind
of stuff that people who were driving automobiles were wearing.
So this is where we would get that image of
pilots wearing bomber jackets and baggy trousers. They were practical
in that they helped the pilot to stay warm and
offered a bit of protection against stuff like you know,
debris that you might encounter or oil that was given
(12:14):
off by the engine, and for that same reason, pilots
typically wore goggles to protect their eyes, and gloves to
protect their hands, and helmets to you know, protect their noggins.
This was in the open cockpit days when airplanes did
not travel to super high altitudes, so there wasn't really
a need for pressurization yet. Also, the temperatures in winter
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could dip as low as negative thirty five celsius when
flying at altitudes of ten to fifteen thousand feet, which
was kind of, you know, not uncommon in some parts
of the world during World War One, so staying warm
was absolutely vital. Then there was this fella named Sidney
Cotton from Australia who helped develop a flight suit that
(12:56):
had a fur and air proof silk lining in it
to protect against the cold. His design was so well
received and it became known as the Sidcot flight suit
for Sydney Cotton. It became the standard for the second
half of World War One for especially the Royal Air Force,
so the sid Cut suits became pretty much universal there.
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The first actual flight suit that was made specifically to
handle the challenges of flying in a plane at higher
altitudes was the product of a pilot named Wiley Post
who along with the company BF Goodrich, created this flight
suit and the suit was pressurized. It had special arm
and leg joints to help the pilot with mobility because
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when you pressurize a suit, I mean you're kind you're
inflating essentially, is what you're doing. So you have to
have some way of dealing with mobility issues because the
suit gets stiff because it's like you're inside a giant balloon.
And also they connected the suit to a source of
liquid oxygen to end up supplying air for the higher altitudes.
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By World War Two, the nature of air combat had
changed and you had bombers that could fly at very
high altitudes. But in the days before pressurized cabins, it
meant that the people inside the planes needed to wear
special flight suits with electric heating elements in them to
fight off the cold at those higher altitudes. And just
as a reminder, electric heaters are really simple electronics. Basically,
(14:25):
you have a conductor that has a pretty good resistance
to electrical flow, and then you try to feed a
current through that conductor. So as electricity tries to flow
through this conductor that has high resistance, a lot of
that electrical energy converts into heat, and this is the
principle behind stuff like electric stovetops and electric toasters. I mean,
(14:47):
it's similar to how incandescent light bulbs work in a
way as well. And I should add that there was
some experimentation with electric heated components even back as far
as World War One, but they were pretty primitive. In addition,
they were typically powered by a small windmill generator that
could be mounted onto the wing of a plane, and
a normal operation that was fine. But if the pilot
(15:08):
ever had to engage in say like a dive, where
the velocity of the air going past the plane increased dramatically,
well that would coincide with an increased output from the
windmill generator, and then you could have way too much
voltage being supplied to the heating elements, and the pilot
could actually get burned by these components that were meant
(15:31):
to keep the pilot warm as they flew, which is
kind of a big yikes. But over time the flight
suit evolved, pressurization, heating elements, oxygen supply, protective elements like helmets,
and the development of flame retardet materials all became part
of the design of flight suits, and post World War
Two we entered into an era of new experimentation with
(15:51):
regard to high altitude flying and really pushing the limits
of both aircraft and human endurance. Part of that was
how human can handle acceleration or G forces, so like
G force being in relation to the strength of gravity
right at sea level essentially, but one G is one
(16:13):
one to one of Earth's gravity. Well, that last bit about,
you know, withstanding acceleration was super important because during intense acceleration,
humans have a tendency to black out. I mean, obviously,
when you're piloting a craft through the air or in space,
that's a bad thing. I mean, it's not really a
good thing in any context, I suppose. But what is
(16:35):
going on here? Why do we black out at higher accelerations. Well,
during those intense accelerations, our blood tends to pool in
the lower part of our body, and that means the
old brain ain't getting enough of that sweet, sweet oxygen
that it craves oh so much. And this can lead
to a grayout, which is where your vision starts to diminish,
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or a full on blackout where you lose your vision
and even a loss of consciousness. Now, the suits developed
in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties used various means,
such as inflatable bladders that could fill with either air
or with water in some cases, to provide pressure on
the lower parts of the body and help push back
(17:17):
against that tendency for blood to pool in the lower
half of the body. Even so, this typically only allows
a pilot to endure a little more acceleration than whatever
their natural tolerance is, so that's somewhere in between three
to five times the force of gravity for most people. Interestingly,
the development of these components was something of a controversy
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in that the people who were building the planes, the
engineers building planes, were kind of worried that if pilots
knew that they could push themselves harder because their suits
would allow them to withstand greater acceleration, that they would
bloody well go and do that, even if it meant
that they were pushing the aircraft beyond its own stress capabilities.
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And so some air forces, some you know, some some
flight schools and stuff, chose to hold back on incorporating
what would become known as G suits for a while
in an effort to avoid encouraging pilots to you know,
go fast. Oh. Also, interestingly, one person to experiment with
g suit development in the early forties was a guy
(18:26):
named Frank Cotton from Australia. I say interestingly because if
you were listening earlier, you heard me talk about Sydney Cotton,
also from Australia. Who is the fella who came up
with that Sidcot suit? So your question is, were Frank
and Sydney Cotton related? I have no cotton pick an idea.
(18:48):
That was a long way to go for something that
wasn't even quite a joke. In fact, I think it
was long enough where we all need to take a
quick break, but we'll be right back. So by the
nineteen fifties, the flight suit had evolved into gear that
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was meant to provide various types of protection to pilots.
With the creation of pressurized cabins with climate control, some
of the stuff was less important, right, Some of the
pressurization things and the heat elements weren't as important and
didn't need to be incorporated into some flight suits. But
flight suits still needed to be flame resistant, they needed
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to allow for mobility, and they needed to provide protection
in the event that a pilot needed to eject from
their aircraft, and also for anything that was involving a
lot of like intense acceleration, you needed to have that
G suit protection. But now let's move on to space suits, because,
as I said earlier, they evolved from flight suits. The
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space race that got started in the nineteen fifties was
really an extension of the Cold War and a race
between the United States and the then Soviet Union to
reach certain milestones before the other could, all while also
demonstrating a technological capability of raining destruction down on the
other country should it all come to that. So in
(20:13):
some ways this was a struggle to clean technological superiority
over a rival. The Soviets really got the jump on
the Americans with the launch of Sputnik in nineteen fifty seven,
marking the first time a human made satellite entered Earth orbit,
and they would also be the first to put a
(20:33):
person into space. The first spacesuit emerged from the then
Soviet Union as part of its cosmonaut program. It had
the designation of SK one. The SK stood for some
Russian words that translate roughly into space diving suit because
the suit had some features similar to like a deep
sea diving suit, think of like the big daddies in BioShock,
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and even this was an evolution of earlier flight suits
worn by Soviet jet fighter pilots. The first human to
go into space was Yuri Gagarin in nineteen sixty one,
and Gageron's trip was aboard a space capsule and he
wasn't going to exit the capsule while in space, so
he didn't need to have the full extra vehicular activity
(21:19):
style spacesuit. However, because the Soviets had not yet developed
a spacecraft that could land safely, he would have to
eject during descent and then parachute down from an altitude
of around twenty thousand feet. So these are the sort
of factors that went into the design of the suit.
They had to make a suit that would be able
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to do these kind of things. The suit had a
helmet that had a visor that could be lowered down
over the face. In fact, it had a pressure sensor.
If the pressure sensor detected a decrease in pressure a
rapid decompression, then the visor could slam down and seal it.
The helmet was permanently attached to the suit. You could
only the helmet off by taking off the whole darn suit.
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Worn Under the helmet was a leather covered radio headset
below the helmet on the suit was a collar that
could inflate in the event that Gageron landed in the water.
That would allow him to keep his head above water
if that were the case, because again, since the helmet
couldn't be removed, there was no getting out of that
suit quickly in the case of water landing, but an
(22:24):
inflated collar could keep his head above the level of water.
The fabric of the suit was nylon, which is a
synthetic polymer, and it was bright orange in color to
make it easier to spot Gagern upon his return. The
suit also had gloves with leather palms and heavy leather boots,
and the suit did the job. Gageran returned safely to
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Earth after spending more than an hour and a half
orbiting the planet. One time, he reportedly startled a farmer
and his daughter as he returned. When he landed, his
walking through the countryside, dragging a parachute behind him, dressed
in a big orange suit and having a big helmet on,
and he tried his best to assure them that he
(23:07):
was a Soviet just like they were, and all he
needed was a telephone in order to call Moscow, which
I just think is a great story. Meanwhile, over the
United States, there was the same rush to get to space,
and at that point it was a rush to catch
up to the Soviets because they had beaten America to
the punch. Engineers were already working on suit designs that
(23:29):
would be suitable to allow astronauts to go outside of
a spacecraft, perhaps even walking on the Moon. But these
were in the earliest stages of development. They were in
the prototype stage. And I saw pictures of one of
the early pressurized suits and it literally looked like it
came out of a Ed Wood science fiction film. If
you don't know who that is, Plan nine from Outer
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Space director, just the cheesiest of nineteen fifty style sci
fi B movies. And the engineer inside the suit was
wearing it looked like kind of a metal barrel for
the torso, like think of like one of those ten
wind up robot toys. It kind of looked like that
had segmented sleeves that covered the arms, had a helmet
(24:12):
with a glass visor that looked kind of like the
head of a Lego figurine kind of had that cylindrical
look to it. They were a long way away from
the modern space suit, is what I'm saying. The Mercury seven,
the pilots suit trained to be part of Project Mercury,
which was our first attempt to send people to space,
relied upon a flight suit called the Navy Mark four,
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which was designed by the BF good Rich Company. The
heritage for the Mark four had traced its history all
the way back to Wiley Post, whom I mentioned before
the break, and in fact they even had the same designer,
a guy named Russell Colly worked on both of those.
The suit had a zipper that extended from the left
shoulder and moved diagonally down across the torso and ended
(24:54):
at the waist. There are also a couple of other zippers.
There were two at the neck and one around the waist,
which made it quote unquote easier to get in and
out of the suit. But when I say easier, just
know that I don't mean easy, just easier than some
other one piece suits. The suit covered the entire body
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except for the head and hands, which were covered by
a detachable helmet and gloves, respectively. So the boots were
built into it, but the gloves were not. The helmet
containing the microphones and speakers were there to serve as
a communication system for the astronauts. The visor was made
out of plexiglass. The visor could also be raised out
(25:35):
of the way or lowered into place and then sealed
with the pneumatic seal, so again it could provide a
pressurized environment for the astronauts if necessary. The gloves attached
to the suit through a tent ball bearing lock. I
do not know what that means. I mean, I know
it's a lock, but I haven't looked into how it
actually worked. But anyway, the purpose for it was to
(25:58):
give the astronauts a little bit more wrisk mobility when
come without you know, compromising the fact that you need
to have a seal there with the rest of the suit,
otherwise you would have a leak. Right. The index and
middle fingers on both gloves had little red lights incorporated
into them, and these were fed by batteries that were
located in a battery pack on the back side of
(26:20):
the gloves. The torso section had two major layers. The
inner layer was made of neoprene and nylon, and the
outer layer had an illuminized nylon fabric designed to reflect
heat away from the astronaut. You know, inside the suit,
a neck ring secured the helmet in place, with an
(26:40):
additional tied down strap to keep the helmet in place
so that should the suit be pressurized, the helmet wouldn't
rise up and block the astronaut's vision. Yeah, that's going
to become important because I'm going to talk about a
case where something like that happened to a Russian cosmonaut
and how it could have been disastrous. So this suit
(27:01):
used a pressurization system to keep pressure inside the suit
close to Earth levels. It also used cords on the
suit to restrict the suit's tendency to expand like a balloon,
which would severely limit maneuverability. The Mercury spacecraft itself was pressurized,
so the suits didn't have to be pressurized for normal operation,
(27:21):
and that made things a little bit easier for the
astronauts who were piloting the spacecraft because they didn't They
had a little more mobility, although they couldn't do much
with that mobility because they were in a tiny, tiny spacecraft.
It was only large enough for one person, and even
then it was cramped The suits also incorporated aluminium in
(27:42):
the materials. Like I mentioned, that provided extra strength compared
to earlier flight suits. But again, these suits were meant
to be worn inside the capsule only these were not
suits that could be worn out in space on their own.
They also didn't have good temperature control. Basically, the oxygen
system they had served as the cooling system. So basically
(28:03):
the way the oxygen system worked was that it had
a tube would attach to the suit at the waist
and oxygen would come in through that tube at the
wasst Oxygen would then circulate a bit through tubes running
inside the suit to help cool down the astronaut, and
(28:24):
then it would eventually make its way up to the helmet,
and then excess would exit out the right side of
the helmet into a different tube including carbon dioxide. There
was also some biosensors and a connector in the suit
to allow the suit to connect to the spacecraft's instruments
that would allow NASA to monitor astronaut vital signs and stuff.
(28:47):
On the left arm of the suit was a pressure indicator,
so that should the suit be pressurized, the astronaut would
be able to see what the pressure level was in
the suit pretty easily. And underneath all of this, the
astronauts wore a one piece lightweight cotton body suit, so
lots of layers here. Alan Shepard became the first American
(29:11):
to go to space one month after Gagarin's achievement. Shepherd's
flight was sub orbital, however, he did not go into orbit.
John Glenn would be the first American to orbit the
Earth in nineteen sixty two, and he completed three orbits
before returning back to Earth. Both Shepherd and Glenn wore
versions of the Mercury spacesuit. But let's hop back over
(29:32):
to the Soviet Union to talk about suits designed to
keep humans safe out in space itself without the benefits
of a having a spacecraft around you. So the Soviets
were the first to have a person take a trip
outside a spacecraft on a spacewalk, which happened in March
of nineteen sixty five. That person was Alexei Leonov. He
(29:52):
would have to enter an airlock and inflatable airlock. He
would then have that and he'd be in the airlock
while his co cosmonaut would release pressure so that there
could be an equalization of the lack of pressure out
in space and the air pressure that's inside the capsule,
(30:14):
and they could transfer outside of the Vokschad to spacecraft
and then spend a few minutes outside doing a spacewalk,
and he remained connected to the capsule by a tether,
so he wouldn't float off aimlessly into space, and the
Soviets would learn some pretty valuable lessons. Nearly at the
expense of Leonov's life. His spacesuit had been called the
(30:37):
Burcut spacesuit. Burcut was actually the name the spacecraft was
a Vakshod two, but it had the name of Burcut,
which means golden eagle, and his suit had a hermetic
casing layer on top of the pressurized space suit and
came complete with a shoulder pack in which the suits
(30:58):
two oxygen cylinders were mounted, so he was carrying his
oxygen to supply on his suit. This would be different
from the way the Americans would do it with Project
Gemini or Jiminy, if you prefer. It was really hard
to find any solid details about this suit, but there
(31:19):
are a few things I can say for sure. One
is that the spacesuit was really bulky even before going
into space, but once in space the suit became even bulkier,
so again, imagine being inside an inflated balloon, and he
started to get the picture. There was a lack of
pressure outside the suit, so the suit expanded in every direction.
(31:40):
That meant that Leonov found that his hands were no
longer securely in his gloves, like his fingers were no
longer in the fingertips of his gloves because the arms
of the spacesuit expanded beyond the length of his arms.
The same thing was happening with his feet, like his
feet were no longer firmly in the boot section of
his suit, and he was having issues seeing through the
(32:03):
helmet as well. That also meant that he would no
longer be able to go back into the spacecraft the
way they had trained, which was to go in through
the airlock feet first, So instead he had to figure
out a way to pull himself inside headfirst, and he
said it took a really long time, and he had
a limited amount of oxygen, about forty five minutes worth total.
(32:27):
He also started overheating. He found that the strain of
moving around inside the suit out in space was pretty intense,
and it was causing him to get really hot inside
the suit. The material of the suit was pretty stiff,
and due to the inflation issue, it meant that fighting
against the suit was necessary in order to get anything done.
(32:47):
He had to not just put forth effort to do
the thing, but to do the thing against the suit.
Even though he was only outside for a little bit,
he was still getting pretty exhausted. So in order to
make his way back back into the airlock, Leonov chose
to vent some of his oxygen out into space because
he needed to be able to regain some flexibility inside
(33:10):
a suit, and it's just fully inflated. He just didn't
have it. It makes me think of that bit in
a Christmas story where the kid can't put his arms
down because he's wrapped up in too many coats. So
this could have been disastrous, as if he had vented
too much oxygen out, he could have been starved of oxygen,
or he could have had a full depressurization of his suit,
(33:32):
or he could have just suffered the effects of depressurization,
kind of like the bends if you come up from
a deep sea dive too quickly. But he was able
to make it inside the airlock, then he had to
crunch up into essentially a fetal position so that he
could turn around, close the airlock and give the signal
to his commander to pressurize the airlock so that he
could come back inside the capsule. So this was just
(33:54):
one of several technical issues that plagued the mission. We'll
talk about another one in a little bit, but overall
the was a success and the cosmonauts returned to Earth safely.
Both the Soviets and Americans included survival kits in their
spacecraft for returning cosmonauts and returning astronauts to use because
in the early days, those space capsules were designed to
(34:16):
either splash down in the ocean, which was the American style,
or to have, you know, kind of a semi soft
landing on land, which was the preferred method of the Soviets.
But while both had some survival and first aid gear
inside these kits, the Soviets approach was slightly more intense
because the Soviet kit included a gun. Now the earlier
(34:39):
kits included a nine millimeters pistol, meant to serve as
some protection should the cosmonauts land in a remote region
in Russia and then need to fight off local wildlife,
which was a very real possibility. On the very mission
in which Leonov went on his spacewalk, the returning capsule
malfunctioned on descent and the cosmonauts had to rest control
(35:01):
from the landing process. They had to get manual control,
which was in itself an ordeal, and it meant that
ultimately they landed really far away from their target landing space,
and actually one hundred miles away from the closest city,
and they landed in a mountainous, snowy region, and Leonov
realized that his little nine millimeter pistol, while some comfort,
(35:24):
would be of little use of He and his fellow
cosmonaut Belyayev encountered wolves or a bear out in the wilderness,
which was a possibility, and so Leonov would later commission
the creation of a new weapon called the TP eighty
two pistol, which was part sawed off shotgun, part rifle.
So it it literally had three barrels, It had two
(35:46):
side by side shotgun barrels, and it had a rifle
barrel mounted below the shotgun barrels, and it was in
a pistol form factor, but I mean that pistol would
pack a heck of a kick, and it also had
a detachable stock that could convert into a machete, so,
you know, typical space stuff. The so used capsules used
(36:06):
by the Russian Space Agency carried a TP eighty two
aboard as recently as two thousand and seven, before the
Russians discontinued that practice, although they did use a different
weapon in its place. Some Russian crews choose not to
have a gun aboard at all, fearing that the presence
of a firearm can kind of make things tense out
in space. But yeah, interesting little side note there. Now,
(36:30):
when we come back, we'll continue down the path of
space suit evolution, but first let's take another quick break.
So Leonov took the first space walk in nineteen sixty five,
and in the process the Russians learned a lot about
(36:51):
the limitations of their spacesuits. In general, the American approach
put more emphasis on comfort and usability than the Russians did.
But the same time, the Russians managed to get to
those things first and the Americans didn't. So back to America.
Starting in nineteen sixty two, so before we had Leonov's spacewalk,
(37:12):
there was the launch of Project Gemini or Jeminy, depending
upon your preferred pronunciation. I preferred Gemini, but yeah, Jiminy
is pretty common when you listen to interviews of the time.
This was the first two astronaut capsule that the Americans used,
and there were a couple of different space suits that
were used in this project, one of which was designed
(37:33):
for extra vehicular activities or spacewalks. That one was called
the G four C. But first let's start with the
G one C. So NASA had to choose which spacesuit
designed to go with for their Gemini project, and since
one of the goals for that project was to have
and astronaut perform a spacewalk, this was a complex issue.
Astronaut Gus Grissom tested out a suit designed by the
(37:56):
David Clark Company, later designated as the G one SEA,
and it had two layers. It had an internal layer
made out of rubber and neoprene, and it had a
pressure bladder inside it for the G suit protection, and
then the outer layer was illuminized, similar to the kind
(38:16):
of material that the Project Mercury spacesuits used. The outer
layer was meant to resist the ballooning effect as well.
There was this suit, by the way, actually went to auction.
Sothabe's had an auction on it and it went for
nearly forty four thousand dollars. The Dave Clark Company then
made a follow up suit called the G two C.
This would actually serve as the prototype for the Gemini
(38:38):
spacesuit designs. None of them were flown. These were not
spacesuits that actually went to space, so they were more
like a proof of concept, and the company had to
make additional changes to address some issues and concerns with
a suit, like for example, there was a visor guard
on the helmet that made the helmet a bit bulkier,
and that in turn would make it harder for astronauts
(39:00):
to move through a spacecraft hatch, so that was one
of the things they had to address. The first suit
to actually see use in Project Gemini was the G
three C, and the G three C had six layers.
The innermost layer was the rubberized nylon bladder to help
provide pressure on extremities and prevent blackouts. All the other
layers were of materials called nylon and nomes, and the
(39:24):
suit's boots could actually be removed. These were not part
of the suit themselves. They could lock into place. The
helmet contained communications equipment, so it really was an evolution
of earlier suits. The G four C, the next one,
added a couple of extra layers on top of the
ones you found on the G three C, and these
(39:45):
layers were milar insulation, meant to help deal with those
extreme temperatures that you could encounter when you're out in space.
The pilot's version of the suit, because the pilot was
the person who would do the spacewalks, had a sun
visor as well. You could attached the sun visor to
the helmet. This would help protect the astronaut from the
bright rays of the sun because obviously there's no atmosphere,
(40:07):
so there's nothing there to diffuse that light. To supply
oxygen to the astronaut inside the suit, the suit actually
had a hose that connected back to the spacecraft, so
it didn't have its own on board oxygen. It had
to connect to the spacecraft when you were out doing
an EVA. The suit also relied upon air conditioning to
help manage temperatures, but the astronauts soon found that this
(40:29):
just wasn't cutting it. The air conditioning wasn't good enough
to help keep their body temperature low as extra vehicular
activities often caused a sharp increase in body temperature, and
not only would it was it uncomfortable, but then you know,
the astronaut would start sweating pretty badly and soon the
inside of their helmet would fog up, so it could
(40:50):
become a real risk. There were a couple of other
space suits in the Gemini line, with the G four
c AMU that stands for Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. There was
also the G five C which was designed to be
more easily removed. So NASA and the astronauts on the
Gemini flights experimented with the astronauts removing their spacesuits in
(41:11):
middle of a mission to see if they could operate
better within the confines of the capsule without those giant
suits on, and surprise, surprise, they found out that there
was a lot easier to do that, and so they
kind of made this determination that when you're not in
part of a critical phase of a mission, like if
(41:32):
you're not in the launch or return or you know,
things like that or docking, if it's just the normal operations,
then they could operate outside of these suits, which you know,
was a nice, nice decision. I guess the Russians similarly
flew several missions without having their cosmonauts wearing spacesuits inside
(41:54):
their spacecraft, but in nineteen seventy one, an accident happened
and a returning Soya's capsule d compressed, and all three
cosmonauts aboard the Soyu's capsule died because none of them
were wearing spacesuits. The Soya's capsule itself wasn't even really
accommodating spacesuits. It wasn't designed to accommodate people, because obviously
(42:15):
when you're wearing a space suit, you're taking up a
lot more well space. But this prompted the Soviet Union
to develop a new emergency recovery spacesuit called the Sokol
Sokol and that has been in use since nineteen seventy
three on Russian space flights. The Gemini spacesuit was meant
to serve as a transition to Apollo missions, as well
(42:35):
as the A one CA spacesuit based off the G
four C. Gemini suit was intended for the first block
of Apollo missions, but tragically, what would later be designated
Apollo one ended in catastrophe when during a launch test,
a fire broke out in the crew cabin and killed
all three members of that mission. The rest of that
(42:56):
phase of the Apollo mission, which was collectively referred to
as Black, was canceled, so the A one C never
saw any use out in space. The second block of
Apollo missions would need suits designed for extra vehicular activity,
and this would end up being a really big move
(43:16):
in NASA's history and a really big move in the
history of space suits. That is where we're going to
pick up with the next episode in this series. We'll
pick up with the creation of the Apollo space suits.
We'll talk about the issues of what happens when you
go from flying very short space missions to very long
(43:38):
space missions aboard spacecraft that do not yet have a toilet,
because that was a thing. In other words, the next
episode is going to be growedy, y'all. It's going to
be gross to the max, so I hope you join
me for that one. But we'll also talk about how
the space suit evolved further, what it was like during
(43:59):
these Space Shuttle era and why NASA was looking to
update it because really spacesuits had not received a massive
update since the Space Shuttle era. But that'll all come
in our next episode. If you have suggestions for topics
I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please
reach out to me and let me know what those are.
The best way to do that is over on Twitter.
(44:21):
The handle for the show is tech Stuffs HSW and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(44:42):
favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Tech Are You? So? Currently, on August twenty six, twenty
twenty four, there is a planned private space launch. SpaceX
(00:28):
is going to be launching four people into orbit, in fact,
a high orbit that human beings have not been in
in quite some time. At least that's the plan. The
four people include Jared Isaacman he is the billionaire founder
of Shift four, Scott Petite, Ann Menon, and Sarah Gillis. Now,
(00:51):
these four private astronauts are planning on going up into
this very high orbit, as I mentioned before. But the
thing I think is really audacious and ambitious is that
the plan is for this to become the first private
space expedition that will include EVAs extra vehicular activities or
(01:14):
space walks in the common parlance. And obviously that's a
huge deal. Like to go out into space with nothing
but a spacesuit to protect you from the fact that,
as I have mentioned many times before in this and
other podcasts, the fact that space is always trying to
kill you. So I think that's a really exciting goal.
(01:38):
And it made me think of an episode that we
published back in twenty twenty one. And because I'm working
on a few other episodes right now that are taking
up a lot of time because there's just a lot
of research to read through, I thought we could revisit
that episode from twenty twenty one. It published August sixteenth,
twenty twenty one, so almost exactly three years ago, just
(02:00):
a little more than that now, and it is titled
Space Suit Evolution I hope you enjoy. Back in March
of twenty twenty, just as we were starting to go
into a work from home phase, I published the episode
(02:21):
about the Artemis program, you know, the one that I
actually ran last week, So if you if you did
miss it back in March twenty twenty, we ran it
again last week. And that might have even been the
very first episode that published after our office closed, because
it published on March sixteenth, twenty twenty, and from a
desk calendar that refuses to change, I know the last
(02:43):
day that most people were in the office was March thirteenth,
twenty twenty. Anyway, in that episode, in case you didn't
listen to the rerun from last week, I described the
goals in the purpose of NASA's Artemis program, which includes
a return to the Moon, and I'm sure that I
mentioned probably moreultiple times that it was an incredibly aggressive goal,
one that I was kind of having trouble seeing NASA
(03:06):
actually achieve. It just seemed like it was too tough
of a thing to do to have it be done
by twenty twenty four. Well, NASA's Office of the Inspector
General has outright said that the twenty twenty four goal
is unachievable because one of the necessary components, that being
a new space suit design, will not be ready until
(03:29):
the spring of twenty twenty five at the earliest. That's
not the only thing that's going to push that program back,
but it's one of the big ones. So I thought
today we would talk a bit about space suits and
their history, and then in our next episode we'll continue
that and talk about the current project to update space
suits and why has it taken so long? Why are
(03:52):
we behind schedule? But to start off with, let's talk
about why you need a space suit out there in
the first place. Now, those of you have been listening
to tech stuff for a while know that I have
a saying, Actually I've got a few of them, but
one of them is space is trying to kill you
all the time. It never rests, and it's always trying
(04:13):
to do it. And there are a lot of ways
that space is doing this. One is that space, like
one of those terrible restaurants, has a complete lack of atmosphere.
I mean, like there's no oxygen out there, so you'd
have nothing to breathe. You could pass out within fifteen
seconds just from that alone. Beyond that, your blood could
boil in space. And that might seem a bit counterintuitive
(04:37):
after all, Like if you're talking about deep space, that's cold, right,
I mean, like if you're talking about deep deep space
you're outside of the Solar System, that would just be
a couple of degrees off from absolute zero, which is
the coldest temperature possible because at absolute zero, there's no
molecular movement at all. Atoms are just kind of perfectly still.
Normally they're vibrating all around the place. So with the
(04:59):
temper sure that cold, you would probably expect to freeze
rather than to boil. I'll come back to the temperature
thing in just a second, but here's the tricky bit. See,
for heat to dissipate, you need to have a way
to transfer it away from one body to another, and
without convection, the heat would tend to stay with you
(05:19):
for a bit. Though you wouldn't stay warm for long.
It's just you wouldn't immediately turn into an ice lolly.
Now that means you'd have enough body heat to boil
off your body fluids and blood. See, the vacuum of
space means there's very very low pressure. Right, there's no
air pressure in space, and that would reduce the boiling
(05:40):
point of the various liquids in your body. And if
they're reduced down low enough, it means that your body
heat alone would be enough to boil off those liquids. Now,
we can totally simulate this on Earth, though preferably not
with a living creature, by putting you a jar of
room temperature water in a vacuum chamber and then sucking
(06:02):
the air out of the chamber, and you can make
water boil at room temperature. This way, the water does
not get hotter or anything like that, it just has
a lower boiling point. Actually, the temperature of your blood
and body fluids would probably go down as it was boiling,
because boiling is an endothermic process and the liquid loses
(06:25):
energy in that process. But we'll move on because we
got a lot of other stuff to cover in this episode.
So those boiling body fluids and the low pressure environment
of space means that all your soft tissues would also
start to swell and expand that would be uncomfortable if
it were just you know, like your skin and maybe
your fat tissue, but it also includes your internal organ
(06:45):
so that's you know, inconvenient at best. Now. I also
mentioned that, as con said in Star Trek two, it's
very cold in space, but that's only part partly true. See,
if you're exposed to sunlight out in outer space, you
could experience temperatures of around one hundred and twenty degrees
(07:07):
celsius or two hundred and forty eight degrees fahrenheit. Now,
if you're out of the sun, if you are in
you know, the shade in space, that temperature would plunge,
though not necessarily all the way down to absolute zero,
you know, because we reserve the super cold stuff or
deep space, but it would go really low, like more
(07:29):
than negative one hundred degrees fahrenheit and that means that
you're going to encounter vastly different temperatures and changes in temperature.
Then you've got tiny particles in space that can be
moving at incredible speeds. These are micro meteoroids, and they
are tiny, but because of momentum, they can pack a
huge punch. See that's that classic equation of momentum is
(07:52):
mass times velocity, So the mass of a some matter
traveling at a specific velocity, which is you know, speed
plus direction. So a tiny particle could have very little mass,
but if it's traveling fast enough, it carries a heck
of a lot of momentum. I mean, that's the principle
behind things like projectile weapons, right. They projectiles don't have
(08:16):
a lot of mass, but they move super fast, so
they have a lot of momentum and thus they can
have a big impact. So you would want to wear
something that could offer at least some protection against that
kind of stuff. Then you've got the various forms of
radiation that you would encounter in space. Here on Earth
we have an atmosphere and a magnetosphere, and together those
(08:36):
provide us with some protection against some of the worst
radiation out there, like gamma radiation and that kind of thing.
But if you're outside of that layer of protection, you
need something to keep you safe from deadly radiation or
else you could suffer some serious consequences from acute burns
to long term health complications like cancer. So obviously, if
(08:57):
you want to visit someplace like the moon, going to
need a special suit to provide protection against the multitude
of ways space is trying to kill you. The suit
needs to be pressurized and allow you to have a
breathable atmosphere inside. The suit needs to be able to
remove carbon dioxide which we exhale so that we can
continue to breathe oxygen and function. It needs to protect
(09:20):
against micro meteoroids at least a little bit. Needs to
keep you at a temperature that's not too hot or
too cold, even as you exert energy to move around
and encounter areas of fluctuating temperatures. Ideally, it also will
include systems that let you communicate with other people. After all,
because space has a shortage of molecules out there, sound
(09:40):
does not travel in space. For sound to travel, molecules
need to vibrate against other molecules. Sound travels through the
air through air pressure, fluctuations and that really, when you
zoom in on, the whole thing would just be air
molecules moving and causing neighboring air molecules to move back
(10:01):
and forth at certain frequencies. And some of those frequencies
we can observe as sound, We can perceive them. Space
does not have that excess of molecules, so there's nothing
to carry sound out there. So we got to have
tech systems built into our suits if we want to
be able to talk to each other or to people
back on Earth. So those are some of the bare
(10:24):
minimum requirements that you would want from your spacesuit, you know,
assuming you were going to go out into space itself.
The earliest spacesuits were a bit simpler than that because
they weren't intended to be worn outside of a spacecraft.
You know, there was no extra vehicular activity or EVA
in the earliest missions. The spacesuits needed to protect the
(10:46):
people in the spacecraft from other potential threats like maybe
a fire aboard the spacecraft. They actually evolved from flight suits.
So let's start with flight suits and work our way up,
all right, So the earliest aviation outfits were for low
altitude flying, because that's what the aircraft of the day
(11:07):
were capable of so early pilots all the way up
into the World War One era would wear some pretty
simple gear. There were a few attempts at creating official
pilot uniforms and suits in the early days of World
War One, but many pilots chose to go up with
their own gear instead, as the suits weren't necessarily a
good fit I mean, so to speak, not like literally fit,
(11:29):
but like they didn't provide the level of protection against
the cold, for example, that a lot of pilots wanted.
So this was actually approved by the military. I mean,
air combat was so new anyway that it was kind
of the military catching up to technology. Most of the gear,
whether it was provided by the military or the pilots themselves,
(11:51):
was either repurposed or modified motoring gear, so the kind
of stuff that people who were driving automobiles were wearing.
So this is where we would get that image of
pilots wearing bomber jackets and baggy trousers. They were practical
in that they helped the pilot to stay warm and
offered a bit of protection against stuff like you know,
debris that you might encounter or oil that was given
(12:14):
off by the engine, and for that same reason, pilots
typically wore goggles to protect their eyes, and gloves to
protect their hands, and helmets to you know, protect their noggins.
This was in the open cockpit days when airplanes did
not travel to super high altitudes, so there wasn't really
a need for pressurization yet. Also, the temperatures in winter
(12:36):
could dip as low as negative thirty five celsius when
flying at altitudes of ten to fifteen thousand feet, which
was kind of, you know, not uncommon in some parts
of the world during World War One, so staying warm
was absolutely vital. Then there was this fella named Sidney
Cotton from Australia who helped develop a flight suit that
(12:56):
had a fur and air proof silk lining in it
to protect against the cold. His design was so well
received and it became known as the Sidcot flight suit
for Sydney Cotton. It became the standard for the second
half of World War One for especially the Royal Air Force,
so the sid Cut suits became pretty much universal there.
(13:19):
The first actual flight suit that was made specifically to
handle the challenges of flying in a plane at higher
altitudes was the product of a pilot named Wiley Post
who along with the company BF Goodrich, created this flight
suit and the suit was pressurized. It had special arm
and leg joints to help the pilot with mobility because
(13:40):
when you pressurize a suit, I mean you're kind you're
inflating essentially, is what you're doing. So you have to
have some way of dealing with mobility issues because the
suit gets stiff because it's like you're inside a giant balloon.
And also they connected the suit to a source of
liquid oxygen to end up supplying air for the higher altitudes.
(14:03):
By World War Two, the nature of air combat had
changed and you had bombers that could fly at very
high altitudes. But in the days before pressurized cabins, it
meant that the people inside the planes needed to wear
special flight suits with electric heating elements in them to
fight off the cold at those higher altitudes. And just
as a reminder, electric heaters are really simple electronics. Basically,
(14:25):
you have a conductor that has a pretty good resistance
to electrical flow, and then you try to feed a
current through that conductor. So as electricity tries to flow
through this conductor that has high resistance, a lot of
that electrical energy converts into heat, and this is the
principle behind stuff like electric stovetops and electric toasters. I mean,
(14:47):
it's similar to how incandescent light bulbs work in a
way as well. And I should add that there was
some experimentation with electric heated components even back as far
as World War One, but they were pretty primitive. In addition,
they were typically powered by a small windmill generator that
could be mounted onto the wing of a plane, and
a normal operation that was fine. But if the pilot
(15:08):
ever had to engage in say like a dive, where
the velocity of the air going past the plane increased dramatically,
well that would coincide with an increased output from the
windmill generator, and then you could have way too much
voltage being supplied to the heating elements, and the pilot
could actually get burned by these components that were meant
(15:31):
to keep the pilot warm as they flew, which is
kind of a big yikes. But over time the flight
suit evolved, pressurization, heating elements, oxygen supply, protective elements like helmets,
and the development of flame retardet materials all became part
of the design of flight suits, and post World War
Two we entered into an era of new experimentation with
(15:51):
regard to high altitude flying and really pushing the limits
of both aircraft and human endurance. Part of that was
how human can handle acceleration or G forces, so like
G force being in relation to the strength of gravity
right at sea level essentially, but one G is one
(16:13):
one to one of Earth's gravity. Well, that last bit about,
you know, withstanding acceleration was super important because during intense acceleration,
humans have a tendency to black out. I mean, obviously,
when you're piloting a craft through the air or in space,
that's a bad thing. I mean, it's not really a
good thing in any context, I suppose. But what is
(16:35):
going on here? Why do we black out at higher accelerations. Well,
during those intense accelerations, our blood tends to pool in
the lower part of our body, and that means the
old brain ain't getting enough of that sweet, sweet oxygen
that it craves oh so much. And this can lead
to a grayout, which is where your vision starts to diminish,
(16:56):
or a full on blackout where you lose your vision
and even a loss of consciousness. Now, the suits developed
in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties used various means,
such as inflatable bladders that could fill with either air
or with water in some cases, to provide pressure on
the lower parts of the body and help push back
(17:17):
against that tendency for blood to pool in the lower
half of the body. Even so, this typically only allows
a pilot to endure a little more acceleration than whatever
their natural tolerance is, so that's somewhere in between three
to five times the force of gravity for most people. Interestingly,
the development of these components was something of a controversy
(17:40):
in that the people who were building the planes, the
engineers building planes, were kind of worried that if pilots
knew that they could push themselves harder because their suits
would allow them to withstand greater acceleration, that they would
bloody well go and do that, even if it meant
that they were pushing the aircraft beyond its own stress capabilities.
(18:04):
And so some air forces, some you know, some some
flight schools and stuff, chose to hold back on incorporating
what would become known as G suits for a while
in an effort to avoid encouraging pilots to you know,
go fast. Oh. Also, interestingly, one person to experiment with
g suit development in the early forties was a guy
(18:26):
named Frank Cotton from Australia. I say interestingly because if
you were listening earlier, you heard me talk about Sydney Cotton,
also from Australia. Who is the fella who came up
with that Sidcot suit? So your question is, were Frank
and Sydney Cotton related? I have no cotton pick an idea.
(18:48):
That was a long way to go for something that
wasn't even quite a joke. In fact, I think it
was long enough where we all need to take a
quick break, but we'll be right back. So by the
nineteen fifties, the flight suit had evolved into gear that
(19:09):
was meant to provide various types of protection to pilots.
With the creation of pressurized cabins with climate control, some
of the stuff was less important, right, Some of the
pressurization things and the heat elements weren't as important and
didn't need to be incorporated into some flight suits. But
flight suits still needed to be flame resistant, they needed
(19:30):
to allow for mobility, and they needed to provide protection
in the event that a pilot needed to eject from
their aircraft, and also for anything that was involving a
lot of like intense acceleration, you needed to have that
G suit protection. But now let's move on to space suits, because,
as I said earlier, they evolved from flight suits. The
(19:51):
space race that got started in the nineteen fifties was
really an extension of the Cold War and a race
between the United States and the then Soviet Union to
reach certain milestones before the other could, all while also
demonstrating a technological capability of raining destruction down on the
other country should it all come to that. So in
(20:13):
some ways this was a struggle to clean technological superiority
over a rival. The Soviets really got the jump on
the Americans with the launch of Sputnik in nineteen fifty seven,
marking the first time a human made satellite entered Earth orbit,
and they would also be the first to put a
(20:33):
person into space. The first spacesuit emerged from the then
Soviet Union as part of its cosmonaut program. It had
the designation of SK one. The SK stood for some
Russian words that translate roughly into space diving suit because
the suit had some features similar to like a deep
sea diving suit, think of like the big daddies in BioShock,
(20:56):
and even this was an evolution of earlier flight suits
worn by Soviet jet fighter pilots. The first human to
go into space was Yuri Gagarin in nineteen sixty one,
and Gageron's trip was aboard a space capsule and he
wasn't going to exit the capsule while in space, so
he didn't need to have the full extra vehicular activity
(21:19):
style spacesuit. However, because the Soviets had not yet developed
a spacecraft that could land safely, he would have to
eject during descent and then parachute down from an altitude
of around twenty thousand feet. So these are the sort
of factors that went into the design of the suit.
They had to make a suit that would be able
(21:40):
to do these kind of things. The suit had a
helmet that had a visor that could be lowered down
over the face. In fact, it had a pressure sensor.
If the pressure sensor detected a decrease in pressure a
rapid decompression, then the visor could slam down and seal it.
The helmet was permanently attached to the suit. You could
only the helmet off by taking off the whole darn suit.
(22:03):
Worn Under the helmet was a leather covered radio headset
below the helmet on the suit was a collar that
could inflate in the event that Gageron landed in the water.
That would allow him to keep his head above water
if that were the case, because again, since the helmet
couldn't be removed, there was no getting out of that
suit quickly in the case of water landing, but an
(22:24):
inflated collar could keep his head above the level of water.
The fabric of the suit was nylon, which is a
synthetic polymer, and it was bright orange in color to
make it easier to spot Gagern upon his return. The
suit also had gloves with leather palms and heavy leather boots,
and the suit did the job. Gageran returned safely to
(22:46):
Earth after spending more than an hour and a half
orbiting the planet. One time, he reportedly startled a farmer
and his daughter as he returned. When he landed, his
walking through the countryside, dragging a parachute behind him, dressed
in a big orange suit and having a big helmet on,
and he tried his best to assure them that he
(23:07):
was a Soviet just like they were, and all he
needed was a telephone in order to call Moscow, which
I just think is a great story. Meanwhile, over the
United States, there was the same rush to get to space,
and at that point it was a rush to catch
up to the Soviets because they had beaten America to
the punch. Engineers were already working on suit designs that
(23:29):
would be suitable to allow astronauts to go outside of
a spacecraft, perhaps even walking on the Moon. But these
were in the earliest stages of development. They were in
the prototype stage. And I saw pictures of one of
the early pressurized suits and it literally looked like it
came out of a Ed Wood science fiction film. If
you don't know who that is, Plan nine from Outer
(23:49):
Space director, just the cheesiest of nineteen fifty style sci
fi B movies. And the engineer inside the suit was
wearing it looked like kind of a metal barrel for
the torso, like think of like one of those ten
wind up robot toys. It kind of looked like that
had segmented sleeves that covered the arms, had a helmet
(24:12):
with a glass visor that looked kind of like the
head of a Lego figurine kind of had that cylindrical
look to it. They were a long way away from
the modern space suit, is what I'm saying. The Mercury seven,
the pilots suit trained to be part of Project Mercury,
which was our first attempt to send people to space,
relied upon a flight suit called the Navy Mark four,
(24:34):
which was designed by the BF good Rich Company. The
heritage for the Mark four had traced its history all
the way back to Wiley Post, whom I mentioned before
the break, and in fact they even had the same designer,
a guy named Russell Colly worked on both of those.
The suit had a zipper that extended from the left
shoulder and moved diagonally down across the torso and ended
(24:54):
at the waist. There are also a couple of other zippers.
There were two at the neck and one around the waist,
which made it quote unquote easier to get in and
out of the suit. But when I say easier, just
know that I don't mean easy, just easier than some
other one piece suits. The suit covered the entire body
(25:14):
except for the head and hands, which were covered by
a detachable helmet and gloves, respectively. So the boots were
built into it, but the gloves were not. The helmet
containing the microphones and speakers were there to serve as
a communication system for the astronauts. The visor was made
out of plexiglass. The visor could also be raised out
(25:35):
of the way or lowered into place and then sealed
with the pneumatic seal, so again it could provide a
pressurized environment for the astronauts if necessary. The gloves attached
to the suit through a tent ball bearing lock. I
do not know what that means. I mean, I know
it's a lock, but I haven't looked into how it
actually worked. But anyway, the purpose for it was to
(25:58):
give the astronauts a little bit more wrisk mobility when
come without you know, compromising the fact that you need
to have a seal there with the rest of the suit,
otherwise you would have a leak. Right. The index and
middle fingers on both gloves had little red lights incorporated
into them, and these were fed by batteries that were
located in a battery pack on the back side of
(26:20):
the gloves. The torso section had two major layers. The
inner layer was made of neoprene and nylon, and the
outer layer had an illuminized nylon fabric designed to reflect
heat away from the astronaut. You know, inside the suit,
a neck ring secured the helmet in place, with an
(26:40):
additional tied down strap to keep the helmet in place
so that should the suit be pressurized, the helmet wouldn't
rise up and block the astronaut's vision. Yeah, that's going
to become important because I'm going to talk about a
case where something like that happened to a Russian cosmonaut
and how it could have been disastrous. So this suit
(27:01):
used a pressurization system to keep pressure inside the suit
close to Earth levels. It also used cords on the
suit to restrict the suit's tendency to expand like a balloon,
which would severely limit maneuverability. The Mercury spacecraft itself was pressurized,
so the suits didn't have to be pressurized for normal operation,
(27:21):
and that made things a little bit easier for the
astronauts who were piloting the spacecraft because they didn't They
had a little more mobility, although they couldn't do much
with that mobility because they were in a tiny, tiny spacecraft.
It was only large enough for one person, and even
then it was cramped The suits also incorporated aluminium in
(27:42):
the materials. Like I mentioned, that provided extra strength compared
to earlier flight suits. But again, these suits were meant
to be worn inside the capsule only these were not
suits that could be worn out in space on their own.
They also didn't have good temperature control. Basically, the oxygen
system they had served as the cooling system. So basically
(28:03):
the way the oxygen system worked was that it had
a tube would attach to the suit at the waist
and oxygen would come in through that tube at the
wasst Oxygen would then circulate a bit through tubes running
inside the suit to help cool down the astronaut, and
(28:24):
then it would eventually make its way up to the helmet,
and then excess would exit out the right side of
the helmet into a different tube including carbon dioxide. There
was also some biosensors and a connector in the suit
to allow the suit to connect to the spacecraft's instruments
that would allow NASA to monitor astronaut vital signs and stuff.
(28:47):
On the left arm of the suit was a pressure indicator,
so that should the suit be pressurized, the astronaut would
be able to see what the pressure level was in
the suit pretty easily. And underneath all of this, the
astronauts wore a one piece lightweight cotton body suit, so
lots of layers here. Alan Shepard became the first American
(29:11):
to go to space one month after Gagarin's achievement. Shepherd's
flight was sub orbital, however, he did not go into orbit.
John Glenn would be the first American to orbit the
Earth in nineteen sixty two, and he completed three orbits
before returning back to Earth. Both Shepherd and Glenn wore
versions of the Mercury spacesuit. But let's hop back over
(29:32):
to the Soviet Union to talk about suits designed to
keep humans safe out in space itself without the benefits
of a having a spacecraft around you. So the Soviets
were the first to have a person take a trip
outside a spacecraft on a spacewalk, which happened in March
of nineteen sixty five. That person was Alexei Leonov. He
(29:52):
would have to enter an airlock and inflatable airlock. He
would then have that and he'd be in the airlock
while his co cosmonaut would release pressure so that there
could be an equalization of the lack of pressure out
in space and the air pressure that's inside the capsule,
(30:14):
and they could transfer outside of the Vokschad to spacecraft
and then spend a few minutes outside doing a spacewalk,
and he remained connected to the capsule by a tether,
so he wouldn't float off aimlessly into space, and the
Soviets would learn some pretty valuable lessons. Nearly at the
expense of Leonov's life. His spacesuit had been called the
(30:37):
Burcut spacesuit. Burcut was actually the name the spacecraft was
a Vakshod two, but it had the name of Burcut,
which means golden eagle, and his suit had a hermetic
casing layer on top of the pressurized space suit and
came complete with a shoulder pack in which the suits
(30:58):
two oxygen cylinders were mounted, so he was carrying his
oxygen to supply on his suit. This would be different
from the way the Americans would do it with Project
Gemini or Jiminy, if you prefer. It was really hard
to find any solid details about this suit, but there
(31:19):
are a few things I can say for sure. One
is that the spacesuit was really bulky even before going
into space, but once in space the suit became even bulkier,
so again, imagine being inside an inflated balloon, and he
started to get the picture. There was a lack of
pressure outside the suit, so the suit expanded in every direction.
(31:40):
That meant that Leonov found that his hands were no
longer securely in his gloves, like his fingers were no
longer in the fingertips of his gloves because the arms
of the spacesuit expanded beyond the length of his arms.
The same thing was happening with his feet, like his
feet were no longer firmly in the boot section of
his suit, and he was having issues seeing through the
(32:03):
helmet as well. That also meant that he would no
longer be able to go back into the spacecraft the
way they had trained, which was to go in through
the airlock feet first, So instead he had to figure
out a way to pull himself inside headfirst, and he
said it took a really long time, and he had
a limited amount of oxygen, about forty five minutes worth total.
(32:27):
He also started overheating. He found that the strain of
moving around inside the suit out in space was pretty intense,
and it was causing him to get really hot inside
the suit. The material of the suit was pretty stiff,
and due to the inflation issue, it meant that fighting
against the suit was necessary in order to get anything done.
(32:47):
He had to not just put forth effort to do
the thing, but to do the thing against the suit.
Even though he was only outside for a little bit,
he was still getting pretty exhausted. So in order to
make his way back back into the airlock, Leonov chose
to vent some of his oxygen out into space because
he needed to be able to regain some flexibility inside
(33:10):
a suit, and it's just fully inflated. He just didn't
have it. It makes me think of that bit in
a Christmas story where the kid can't put his arms
down because he's wrapped up in too many coats. So
this could have been disastrous, as if he had vented
too much oxygen out, he could have been starved of oxygen,
or he could have had a full depressurization of his suit,
(33:32):
or he could have just suffered the effects of depressurization,
kind of like the bends if you come up from
a deep sea dive too quickly. But he was able
to make it inside the airlock, then he had to
crunch up into essentially a fetal position so that he
could turn around, close the airlock and give the signal
to his commander to pressurize the airlock so that he
could come back inside the capsule. So this was just
(33:54):
one of several technical issues that plagued the mission. We'll
talk about another one in a little bit, but overall
the was a success and the cosmonauts returned to Earth safely.
Both the Soviets and Americans included survival kits in their
spacecraft for returning cosmonauts and returning astronauts to use because
in the early days, those space capsules were designed to
(34:16):
either splash down in the ocean, which was the American style,
or to have, you know, kind of a semi soft
landing on land, which was the preferred method of the Soviets.
But while both had some survival and first aid gear
inside these kits, the Soviets approach was slightly more intense
because the Soviet kit included a gun. Now the earlier
(34:39):
kits included a nine millimeters pistol, meant to serve as
some protection should the cosmonauts land in a remote region
in Russia and then need to fight off local wildlife,
which was a very real possibility. On the very mission
in which Leonov went on his spacewalk, the returning capsule
malfunctioned on descent and the cosmonauts had to rest control
(35:01):
from the landing process. They had to get manual control,
which was in itself an ordeal, and it meant that
ultimately they landed really far away from their target landing space,
and actually one hundred miles away from the closest city,
and they landed in a mountainous, snowy region, and Leonov
realized that his little nine millimeter pistol, while some comfort,
(35:24):
would be of little use of He and his fellow
cosmonaut Belyayev encountered wolves or a bear out in the wilderness,
which was a possibility, and so Leonov would later commission
the creation of a new weapon called the TP eighty
two pistol, which was part sawed off shotgun, part rifle.
So it it literally had three barrels, It had two
(35:46):
side by side shotgun barrels, and it had a rifle
barrel mounted below the shotgun barrels, and it was in
a pistol form factor, but I mean that pistol would
pack a heck of a kick, and it also had
a detachable stock that could convert into a machete, so,
you know, typical space stuff. The so used capsules used
(36:06):
by the Russian Space Agency carried a TP eighty two
aboard as recently as two thousand and seven, before the
Russians discontinued that practice, although they did use a different
weapon in its place. Some Russian crews choose not to
have a gun aboard at all, fearing that the presence
of a firearm can kind of make things tense out
in space. But yeah, interesting little side note there. Now,
(36:30):
when we come back, we'll continue down the path of
space suit evolution, but first let's take another quick break.
So Leonov took the first space walk in nineteen sixty five,
and in the process the Russians learned a lot about
(36:51):
the limitations of their spacesuits. In general, the American approach
put more emphasis on comfort and usability than the Russians did.
But the same time, the Russians managed to get to
those things first and the Americans didn't. So back to America.
Starting in nineteen sixty two, so before we had Leonov's spacewalk,
(37:12):
there was the launch of Project Gemini or Jeminy, depending
upon your preferred pronunciation. I preferred Gemini, but yeah, Jiminy
is pretty common when you listen to interviews of the time.
This was the first two astronaut capsule that the Americans used,
and there were a couple of different space suits that
were used in this project, one of which was designed
(37:33):
for extra vehicular activities or spacewalks. That one was called
the G four C. But first let's start with the
G one C. So NASA had to choose which spacesuit
designed to go with for their Gemini project, and since
one of the goals for that project was to have
and astronaut perform a spacewalk, this was a complex issue.
Astronaut Gus Grissom tested out a suit designed by the
(37:56):
David Clark Company, later designated as the G one SEA,
and it had two layers. It had an internal layer
made out of rubber and neoprene, and it had a
pressure bladder inside it for the G suit protection, and
then the outer layer was illuminized, similar to the kind
(38:16):
of material that the Project Mercury spacesuits used. The outer
layer was meant to resist the ballooning effect as well.
There was this suit, by the way, actually went to auction.
Sothabe's had an auction on it and it went for
nearly forty four thousand dollars. The Dave Clark Company then
made a follow up suit called the G two C.
This would actually serve as the prototype for the Gemini
(38:38):
spacesuit designs. None of them were flown. These were not
spacesuits that actually went to space, so they were more
like a proof of concept, and the company had to
make additional changes to address some issues and concerns with
a suit, like for example, there was a visor guard
on the helmet that made the helmet a bit bulkier,
and that in turn would make it harder for astronauts
(39:00):
to move through a spacecraft hatch, so that was one
of the things they had to address. The first suit
to actually see use in Project Gemini was the G
three C, and the G three C had six layers.
The innermost layer was the rubberized nylon bladder to help
provide pressure on extremities and prevent blackouts. All the other
layers were of materials called nylon and nomes, and the
(39:24):
suit's boots could actually be removed. These were not part
of the suit themselves. They could lock into place. The
helmet contained communications equipment, so it really was an evolution
of earlier suits. The G four C, the next one,
added a couple of extra layers on top of the
ones you found on the G three C, and these
(39:45):
layers were milar insulation, meant to help deal with those
extreme temperatures that you could encounter when you're out in space.
The pilot's version of the suit, because the pilot was
the person who would do the spacewalks, had a sun
visor as well. You could attached the sun visor to
the helmet. This would help protect the astronaut from the
bright rays of the sun because obviously there's no atmosphere,
(40:07):
so there's nothing there to diffuse that light. To supply
oxygen to the astronaut inside the suit, the suit actually
had a hose that connected back to the spacecraft, so
it didn't have its own on board oxygen. It had
to connect to the spacecraft when you were out doing
an EVA. The suit also relied upon air conditioning to
help manage temperatures, but the astronauts soon found that this
(40:29):
just wasn't cutting it. The air conditioning wasn't good enough
to help keep their body temperature low as extra vehicular
activities often caused a sharp increase in body temperature, and
not only would it was it uncomfortable, but then you know,
the astronaut would start sweating pretty badly and soon the
inside of their helmet would fog up, so it could
(40:50):
become a real risk. There were a couple of other
space suits in the Gemini line, with the G four
c AMU that stands for Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. There was
also the G five C which was designed to be
more easily removed. So NASA and the astronauts on the
Gemini flights experimented with the astronauts removing their spacesuits in
(41:11):
middle of a mission to see if they could operate
better within the confines of the capsule without those giant
suits on, and surprise, surprise, they found out that there
was a lot easier to do that, and so they
kind of made this determination that when you're not in
part of a critical phase of a mission, like if
(41:32):
you're not in the launch or return or you know,
things like that or docking, if it's just the normal operations,
then they could operate outside of these suits, which you know,
was a nice, nice decision. I guess the Russians similarly
flew several missions without having their cosmonauts wearing spacesuits inside
(41:54):
their spacecraft, but in nineteen seventy one, an accident happened
and a returning Soya's capsule d compressed, and all three
cosmonauts aboard the Soyu's capsule died because none of them
were wearing spacesuits. The Soya's capsule itself wasn't even really
accommodating spacesuits. It wasn't designed to accommodate people, because obviously
(42:15):
when you're wearing a space suit, you're taking up a
lot more well space. But this prompted the Soviet Union
to develop a new emergency recovery spacesuit called the Sokol
Sokol and that has been in use since nineteen seventy
three on Russian space flights. The Gemini spacesuit was meant
to serve as a transition to Apollo missions, as well
(42:35):
as the A one CA spacesuit based off the G
four C. Gemini suit was intended for the first block
of Apollo missions, but tragically, what would later be designated
Apollo one ended in catastrophe when during a launch test,
a fire broke out in the crew cabin and killed
all three members of that mission. The rest of that
(42:56):
phase of the Apollo mission, which was collectively referred to
as Black, was canceled, so the A one C never
saw any use out in space. The second block of
Apollo missions would need suits designed for extra vehicular activity,
and this would end up being a really big move
(43:16):
in NASA's history and a really big move in the
history of space suits. That is where we're going to
pick up with the next episode in this series. We'll
pick up with the creation of the Apollo space suits.
We'll talk about the issues of what happens when you
go from flying very short space missions to very long
(43:38):
space missions aboard spacecraft that do not yet have a toilet,
because that was a thing. In other words, the next
episode is going to be growedy, y'all. It's going to
be gross to the max, so I hope you join
me for that one. But we'll also talk about how
the space suit evolved further, what it was like during
(43:59):
these Space Shuttle era and why NASA was looking to
update it because really spacesuits had not received a massive
update since the Space Shuttle era. But that'll all come
in our next episode. If you have suggestions for topics
I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please
reach out to me and let me know what those are.
The best way to do that is over on Twitter.
(44:21):
The handle for the show is tech Stuffs HSW and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(44:42):
favorite shows.
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