cover image Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Nicholas de Monchaux. MIT, $34.95 (250p) ISBN 978-0-262-01520-2

Berkeley architecture professor de Monchaux's thorough and artful history of the American spacesuit takes readers at a leisurely pace through the past, from the first air travel (via balloon) through fashions of the mid-20th century and manned missions into outer space. De Monchaux dissects the many materials and manufacturing processes involved in construction of the precision-stitched latex spacesuit, the "simultaneous flexibility and precision" of which has kept it popular, and the AX-2, a hard suit "container, not clothing." De Monchaux situates readers in the culture of the time, with discussions of the stewardess as icon (the astronaut's "airborne counterpart"), JFK's medical treatments, and IBM vs. DEC (defunct by 1998) computers that paint a full backstory of every element, from "a brief history of rubber" and its pre-spacesuit application to girdles to fascinating details of obtaining transmissions from space, creating a wholly absorbing capsule of our history. "[I]n %E2%80%98suiting' man to an environment defined by its hostility to him, the spacesuit itself would come to play a central role in discussions of man both made and remade, earthly and, it almost seemed, divine." Photos. (Mar.)