Preserving the wearable legacy of America’s space program.
The National Air and Space Museum has some 270 complete pressure-suits in its collection. Their evolution tells the broader story of NASA’s efforts to send humans into space.
The earliest spacesuits worn by the Mercury astronauts were modified U.S. Navy high-altitude suits that were primarily designed to provide protection in case their space capsules depressurized during flight. Wearing these early suits was akin to wearing an inflated balloon, making it difficult to move and bend.
Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra wore this spacesuit, which was developed by B.F. Goodrich from the U.S. Navy MK-IV full pressure-suit.
The Mercury-era suits wouldn’t work for the Gemini program, which required astronauts to perform complex tasks outside their spacecraft. So suit designers added rubber-coated fabric bladders to the Gemini spacesuits to limit the ballooning effect and enable more flexibility.
The Apollo program presented engineers with the challenge of designing spacesuits that were becoming more like wearable spacecraft. In addition to providing a pressurized enclosure, the lunar spacesuit had to supply enough oxygen for lengthy excursions and protect astronauts from solar radiation, large temperature variations, and tiny high-speed meteorites.
Given the strength and durability of spacesuits when they were worn by astronauts, they are surprisingly fragile as museum artifacts. They were made for a short lifespan in the most extreme conditions. They weren’t designed with long-term survival in mind. This has presented an ongoing challenge for Museum conservators. “The first part of the Apollo and earlier suits to deteriorate is the rubber bladder,” says Cathleen Lewis, curator of international space programs and spacesuits at the National Air and Space Museum. “It is made from synthetic rubber, not natural rubber. Rubbers deteriorate very quickly.”
The insulating layers inside the thermal micrometeoroid garment are another part of the spacesuits that were built to be tough but have succumbed to the ravages of time. The garment—made from Mylar, Kapton, Betamarcoset, and Dacron—served not only as thermal insulation, but also as a multi-layered barrier against small fast-traveling particles. “These layers age and become brittle,” says Lewis. “They also suffer from the impact of the hydrochloric acid that rubber gives off as it decays.”
The Museum’s Apollo collection includes 46 suits that flew in space, along with another 80 suits that never left Earth because they were used exclusively for training or were backups.
Apollo spacesuit prototype AS-L (left) was manufactured in early 1966. Six years later, Charles M. Duke Jr. wore this spacesuit (right) when he was Apollo 16’s lunar module pilot.
Over the years, NASA and spacesuit manufacturers destroyed many of the records of suit development, which is why the non-mission suits are especially valuable for historians. “They are the manifestations of the conversations that spacesuit engineers, NASA administrators, astronauts, spacecraft designers, and mission planners had while working on human spaceflight missions,” says Lewis. “They tell the story of engineering paths not taken, and those that were explored and abandoned.”
This article is from the Spring 2024 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.
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