How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a
triumph of intimacy over engineering. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore
spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with
a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by
seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This
book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph
over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex
Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex"-a
victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation
over cybernetics. Playtex's spacesuit went up against hard
armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored
by NASA's engineers. It was only when those attempts failed-when
traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into
mission requirements-that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got
the job. In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the
twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing
twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the
technology of the twentieth century. He touches, among other
things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior's New Look,
Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully
cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA's
Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering
to city planning. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux
argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us 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.
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