Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Reflections of Humanity in a Spacesuit for Moonwalkers

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

Host Mat Kaplan in a long and fascinating conversation with Nicholas de Monchaux, author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. This great book is about much more than creation of the suits that allowed humans to walk and work on the Moon. Jason Davis shares pointers on looking for LightSail 2 overhead, while Bruce Betts provides a solar sail update in this week’s What’s Up. And you might win a Planetary Radio t-shirt! Learn more about this week’s guests and topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0814-2019-spacesuit-nicholas-de-monchaux.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It lives and breathes with you, the spacesuit, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. I love being pleasantly surprised, and the book we'll talk about this week is much more than pleasant. We'll meet Nicolas de Machaut, the author of Spacesuit, Fashioning Apollo, a beautifully designed book that is about so much more. Bruce Betts will provide another LightSail 2 update when we begin this week's What's Up segment. And with the Planetary Society's solar sail up above us right now, we'll hear from the Society's digital editor, Jason Davis, about how to see it with your own eyes. Jason, as we record, it's not quite out yet, but hopefully by the time

people are able to hear this, you will have included at planetary.org some useful directions on how to catch light sail too. Yeah, we've been getting this question a lot. And while we have the information on our mission page, we decided it would be best to kind of list it all out in a blog post about exactly what to do if you want to try to see LightSail 2 in the night sky. What's the trick? On our mission control page, this is the page we have at planetary.org slash mission control. We have vital signs of the spacecraft there from the telemetry we're downloading from it. And then we also have a map showing the spacecraft's current position. And beneath that map, you'll see the next time

the spacecraft is flying in range of your location. Now that's based on your browser's reported location. And you can look on the map for a little red dot to see where the page thinks you are. Now, just because LightSail is flying within range of you doesn't mean you'll necessarily be able to see it during that pass. Ideally, you need to be in shadow. The sun needs to be below the horizon for you, but it still needs to be high enough to shine on the spacecraft. So that means a little bit before dawn, a little bit after dusk are the best times to see it. And then if you want to take the guesswork out of that and actually get predictions on how good the pass will be, we've got a link right there that will take you to a page that provides the quality of each pass. So it says like marginal, good, or excellent.

And if you're getting up in the middle of the night, you don't want to get up for one that's iffy. You want to get up for one that is pretty guaranteed to show you something good. Although our chief operating officer, Jennifer Vaughn, was up at 4.30 in the morning and she did catch it. Apparently, it was quite dim, but there was no question that it was light sail two passing overhead. Yeah. For most of us here in the United States, the spacecraft only comes up to a certain elevation in the southern sky. And that's because LightSail 1 had a much higher inclination and kind of covered more of the Earth. But LightSail 2 got in this 24 degree inclination, which means that it sticks a lot closer to the equator as it's flying around the Earth. So that means if you're near the

equator, you got a great chance of seeing it. If you're up in, say, the northern United States or northern Europe, your chances of seeing it are not good. In fact, most people in the northern part of the country, in the United States here at least, won't be able to see it. Well, good luck, everybody. I am hearing from listeners who are itching for the opportunity to try for this. And you can get a lot of help at planetary.org. Check out that control panel. Before we go, there have been some other big successes and major progress of some missions across the sky. Let's start with Hayabusa 2, which you just wrote a piece about.

Yeah, Hayabusa 2, we've been covering it quite a bit on the blog, but because of light sail taking up so much of our emphasis, we hadn't reported in on what the spacecraft had been up to for a while. So it did complete its second touchdown. It touched down and grabbed a second sample. And this was a high risk touchdown. A lot of boulders near where it was going to go in and grab that sample.

We have a spectacular video of it on the blog where you can actually watch the spacecraft coming down. Its sample horn presses into the ground and it fires this little bullet into the surface and that sprays a bunch of material up to collect it. So yeah, so we kind of covered all of that. And we also learned in that blog post and through JAXA's, that's Japan's National Space Exploration Agency, that they were within 60 meters of where they, 60 centimeters rather, of where they were aiming when they touched down. So pretty incredible stuff. This piece, by the way, Jason posted it on August 12th. Hayabusa2 nailed its second touchdown on asteroid Ryugu. You can find it at planetary.org. You'll see this video, but it's a sped up video. And fortunately,

you have a link to the full video running at actual speed, real-time speed. I highly recommend people click that link because it is just spectacular to see all this flotsam and jetsam that has been kicked up by Hayabusa's little bullet. It's just amazing, amazing video. Very briefly, a couple of other missions. Tell us what's little bullet. It's just amazing, amazing video. Very briefly, a couple of other missions. Tell us what's going on. Yeah, today Chandrayaan-2, that's India's lunar lander, is entering lunar orbit. So that'll be a big deal. We'll have a post on the blog about how that goes. And then also OSIRIS-REx, NASA's sample return mission. They have just narrowed down the selection sites for where they plan to potentially take a sample. And we'll have a blog post on that coming soon as well.

Excellent, Jason. Lots of stuff to see now and much to look forward to. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society and our embedded reporter with LightSail 2. Next up, that amazing conversation that begins with a spacesuit. Each year, the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico produces the Interplanetary Festival in its hometown. Big crowds arrived last June to hear terrific live music, enjoy the art galleries and demonstrations,

and to hear from big thinkers about much more than planetary science and exploration. I was invited to spend three days talking with some of the festival's guest speakers. Later this year, you'll hear my conversations with scientists and engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, along with the authors who created the great science fiction series The Expanse. Expected to begin its third season on Amazon Prime before too long, Nicolas de Mongeau is Assistant professor of architecture at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design. He was at the festival to talk about his book,

Spacesuit, Fashioning Apollo. This urban planner and architect has written one of the most interesting books I've read this or any other year. Here is our long and delightful conversation. You'll hear how the creation of the spacesuit that allowed humans to live and work on the moon is intricately woven into our understanding of what it means to be human. Nicholas, thank you so much for joining me here at the Interplanetary Festival.

We are on a powerless, literally powerless podcast stage, but fortunately, our technology can run on battery. So glad we can have this conversation about this book, which you have heard me raving about. Thank you for doing this. Oh, it's a great pleasure. The book is Spacesuit Fashioning Apollo. You told me when we spoke a couple of days ago that it got its start, its foundation, if you will, a word that will come up again, basically because of our sponsor, our host here, the Santa Fe Institute. That's right. Yes.

In fact, the current Santa Fe Institute director, David Krakauer, who started the Interplanetary Festival last year, invited me to give a lecture here at the Santa Fe Institute in 2003 when I was just out of grad school. here at the Santa Fe Institute in 2003 when I was just out of grad school. He'd heard me talk about architecture and complexity when I was a resident at the Institute, but I was looking for a subject that would really help convey this to a wide audience. And I'd done a little bit of work in graduate school on the history of the Apollo spacesuit, but given the prompting of the invitation by David, I put the story together into a lecture,

and to make a very long story short, the project came from there. And it only took eight years from 2003 to come out as a book from the MIT Press in 2011. As I have told you, it shows. I made the mistake of starting with the audible version, the spoken word version, which was excellent. But I really missed out because, after all, you are a designer. And I missed out on the beautiful layout of this book. It's actually going far more slowly now that I'm reading it off of the printed page because now, of course, I'm spending so much time ogling the great illustrations.

It's a visual story. I think what I brought to the history of the spacesuit was determination to examine it not just as a technological artifact but as a social and cultural artifact as well. Of course all technology is in its own way a cultural artifact too but we tend to separate technology and see it as a kind of engineering, the home to an engineering priesthood and something that doesn't have a lot of ideas or culture embedded in it, but it's deeply embedded with ideas and culture, as I tried to show in the book and in the structure of the book as well,

which goes through a lot of different topics as well as the story of the Apollo suit at the center. You know, you've made me think of a quote that I already used in a previous interview here at the Interplanetary Festival, and it is that great Marshall McLuhan quote that I love so much, first we shape our tools, then they shape us.

Right, absolutely. And the spaceuit in particular, not only is it a tool, but it's a home and it's a visual icon. And it's the subject of the most reproduced, second most reproduced image in human history after the whole earth. And so it's also the MTV Video Music Awards mannequin and a million other things in our culture as well. We'll come back to all of that. Your subtitle, Fashion in Apollo, carefully chosen, obviously, because you note in the book that fashion is both a verb and a noun. Right. Well, fashion, I love the word fashion in this context.

We tend to think of fashion as meaning something that's superficial or flighty or superfluous, but fashion is such an important part of our own identity. The great philosopher RuPaul says, you know, we get out of bed naked every morning and everything else is drag. You know, we're always presenting ourselves through what we wear and how we present ourselves in the world. But then fashioning in the context of design and engineering has this other meaning, which is making something out of something else, which is very much tied to the history of adaptation and evolution, which I talk about in the book,

and then the history of improvisation and invention in the context of the incredibly compressed, white-hot heat of the Apollo program and the race to get to the moon, which forced a whole set of adaptations and inventions, including the sewing of the Apollo spacesuit by seamstresses who had been taken from the shop floor of the Playtex bra and girdle company. Oh, you're getting ahead because Playtex is one of the great revelations of this book. Yeah.

I had heard of this company, ILC. Right. Didn't realize that that was basically Playtex. Well, I mean, so the company was the International Latex Corporation. Playtex was only its consumer brand, like Kimberly-Clark is known as Kleenex. But the founder of the International Latex Corporation, Abraham Spinell, made his money actually sewing girdles during and after the Second World War. But then because his business was so impacted by the Second World War,

he maintained a very small sort of government contracts division. And that division grew after they ended up getting the contract for the Apollo suit from about 15 people to more than 150 that actually produced the final suits. And a brilliant marketer. Yes. You use that great Playtex slogan, lives and breathes with you. Yes, which the girdles did neither from everyone. I've never worn one.

But in fact, one of my very close family friends, friend of my aunts and uncles, was a flight attendant during this era. And ironically, flight attendants, also iconic jet age individuals, were required at that time to wear girdles. And it just sounds dreadful. It does. But that slogan maybe is much more appropriate to the spacesuits that you talk about in the book, particularly the ones that were actually accepted for Apollo. We're going to get to that, of course. You also chose to call the chapters of the book layers, and you have 21 of these layers for a very good reason.

What amazed me about the story of this suit and its astonishing history as an object was how complex and multilayered the history was. And I couldn't help, being a somewhat literal person as well, see a direct connection to the fact that the suit itself was an incredibly complex and multilayered object, sewn out of 21 different layers of fabric, inserted into each other like a Russian doll,

sewn to a 64th of an inch tolerance by those seamstresses with no pins because the pins could break the pressure layer. And so in part to honor them and their contribution, I constructed the book conceptually and intellectually as a set of layers as well that I tried to sew together with even a tenth of the elegance that those layers of the actual suit were made from. I think you wrote it to very good tolerances and did a great job. I rarely do this, but I want to read a page from the book because I think it captures so well what

I believe is your central message. And we should say, I don't think I have yet, there is so much more to this book than just learning about the Apollo space suit. All right, here we are in your conclusion, layer 21. And it starts with that great image that you include of Neil Armstrong. He has just made the first excursion out onto the surface of the moon. Clearly this spacesuit, its 21 layers have worked perfectly.

He is exhausted, but as you say, visibly elated. Armstrong is also clearly exhausted. In a manner that would especially plague later Skylab astronauts, the systems and schedules that transported him to the moon's surface did so in spite of, and not in sympathy with, the logic of his own body. Armstrong is shown radically extended, not in the cybernetic sense of augmentation, but in the literal sense of physical distance and physiological exhaustion. Set against the control switches and visual austerity of the Eagle's interior is the essential conflict between electronic order and robust intimate disorder that defines the special softness of spacesuit and spaceman.

You go on from there to talk about some of the other spacesuits that you also describe the development of and these were hardsuits. It is this great strange paradox that some of these other suits received so much more attention, and in some cases still do, than the suits that actually worked. So we're talking about a set of prototype suits that were made both at the Ames Research Center and then also by Lytton Industries, one of the largest military-industrial conglomerates of the 1960s. And as a great example of what you're talking about, at the 1970 Osaka World's Fair, the American pavilion designed by the architect David Brody was this vast inflatable structure filled, completely filled with artifacts

of the space race and artifacts of the successful journeys of Apollo. But as you filed through the exhibit, the capsule that Columbia was there, the ILC suits with their Hamilton Standard backpacks, but at the very last image was a sort of halftone image of maybe the moon, maybe the surface of Mars, looking forward and standing in front of it as the last iconic image of the World's Fair exhibit were two Lytton prototype hardsuits. And I think that they had an outsized role both in the mentality of spacesuit designers. Joe Cosmo, the great, very talented engineer in charge of the Crew Systems Division, gave the Lytton suits the designation RX, ostensibly because

they were rigid experimental, but actually, as he explained to me, because he at the time thought that they would be the prescription, like a RX drug prescription for how man would travel into space. As I chart even going further back into the origins of the word cyborg in a much earlier 1958 Air Force study about how the human body would be modified by mechanical systems to walk onto the surface of the moon. Both the enormous promise and successes of systems engineering in the context of the Apollo program and the kind of masculine ideals of these heroic male astronauts all conspired to make a kind of hard armor-like suit seem like

the most natural thing. And they use the word natural there, ironically. You know, NASA put out a press release in 1964 showing a Lytton suit next to a suit of armor with the caption, nothing new under ye old sun, you know. And so this idea that these were valiant knights going off to conquer and colonize outer space was very much barely sublimated onto the surface. But for all kinds of reasons, partially to do with weight, partially also to do with the fact that when hard suits failed, they failed catastrophically.

So all of these things together conspire to make this rather ungainly, messy-looking, especially when you take off its white exterior, ILC suit actually be the most successful suit. And as Neil Armstrong said in this great letter to ILC after the lunar landing, he said it was beautiful, the most beautiful object of the space race as far as he was concerned, partially because he described it as cute and cuddly, but mostly, he says, because it worked. You also describe at the very end of the book, it's a very touching scene, really,

talking about how the astronauts still feel about these suits as if it had been a part of their own body. Oh, this was the most astonishing thing, Matt. I was very fortunate to spend a year as a Guggenheim Research Fellow at the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, and I spent most of my time working with a very skilled conservator of the suits at the time, Amanda Young, out at the, I kid you not, Suitland Storage Facility in Maryland. No coincidental title. And while I was working out there, I had the great fortune to meet several Apollo astronauts, not because they were, of

course, particularly interested in talking to me amongst all the other millions of people trying to get part of their time, but because they wanted to come and see their suits. And I remember talking to Tom Stafford, who is the commander of Apollo 10, because this was incredibly poignant to me. And I said, well, you know, are you going to visit your capsule? Are you going to visit the lander replica that's in the lobby? And he said, oh, no, no, that's just a truck. But this was part of me.

So I think, you know, the larger argument of the book, which you referenced in that quote, is that the Apollo spacesuit represented a kind of protective device for the astronaut's body, not just against the incredibly hostile lunar vacuum, but also against this larger organizational logic of what were essentially, and very literally in the case of Mercury and Gemini, repurposed nuclear weapons,

you know, with human beings inserted on the top that had a very different design ethos than the bodies that the suits were protecting. And it's not to say that the suit didn't also have a lot to do with the successes and skills of systems engineering. It just acted as a kind of intermediary, both organizationally and physically, in between the logic of the human body, which is very different, allowing it to exist in all kinds of hostile environments.

This is your thesis in the book. It's not just hard suits which didn't work very well and what they represented, and the soft suits that did work well, but you do such a good job of showing how this attempt to apply systems engineering, system design work, systems management, it may be good if you're putting together, let's say, a Saturn V rocket. But when you're trying to apply it to humans or human-based systems, you better think twice.

Yes, the incredible achievement of the Apollo hardware in particular was of making the most complex objects that humanity had ever made and making them work. I mean, we're sitting here in a temporary blackout because a generator just failed. And one of the core truths of technology is that it almost always doesn't work like it's supposed to. We often fail to realize that and fail to build into our systems the resilience and robustness necessary. But that was done with the amazing Apollo hardware, especially after it was all revisited in the light of the Apollo 1 disaster. One of the most interesting things about the book for me, and this may lead to, you may

have a question about this already, but as an architect and someone who spends most of his time working on urban design and design in the city, I expected this book to be a kind of parable about designing for complexity, because especially in this day and age, once again, we have a lot of excitement about technology in the city, and Google is building neighborhoods, and we hear the phrase smart city all the time to describe what technology can do for us in our complex urban environments. But what I discovered, and what a fantastic historian at MIT named Jennifer Light has actually done a really great job of writing about is that the the transfer between NASA and

the systems engineering context and the context of urban design and development could not have been more direct. There were summer schools, summer studies in 1964-1965 between HUD and NASA, NASA's Director of Nuclear Propulsion Research, Howard Finger, in the 1960s became the first Director of Research and Technology for HUD. Simon Rameau, who invented systems engineering. Rameau of the famous TRW. Invented systems engineering with Bernard Shriver of the Air Force, published a book called Cure for Chaos

about the role of systems engineering in cities. Bernard Shriver, who invented systems engineering for the Air Force, was by 1968 heading a company called Urban Systems Associates. It goes on and on. And a lot of these direct attempts to implement systems engineering in the context of 1960s and 70s cities were you know disastrous doesn't even cover it very well-meaning but clearly and you have a chapter a layer in the book that goes into this and basically were acknowledged shortly after these attempts to be failures yes yeah and you're right that was someplace else I wanted to go and I'm glad that you mentioned Jennifer Little because on that same page that I read from a little bit before,

let me read that, there's a paragraph there. Then again, we often fail to see that which is most apparent. In the case of the Apollo spacesuit, both its platex origins and its epidermal structure seem to strike at a core of corporeal intimacy that we are embarrassed to address. This intimate layered reality hides essential and sometimes difficult truths. We ignore them at our peril. Continuing, first among these is the continuing failure of systems thinking, however complex, to master the robust realities of human life at any scale.

Presenting a study of defense intellectuals' introduction of systems management to mid-century American planning, historian Jennifer Light asks an incisive question. How and why are resources allocated time and again to support the adoption of technical and technological tools whose benefits remain unproven. And then back to your words. This is in essence the same question we are asking here. Why has the complex layered reality of the Apollo spacesuit evaded any level of design inquiry? Why instead are unproven, if elegant, prototypes elevated as exemplary of good design? The answers to questions about both design for the city on Earth and the body in space are intimately related.

Lovely language, first of all. Thank you. Thank you. Am I right? Does that kind of capture what you hope to establish with it? And you're right, it has not. Maybe it has been ignored, but your book certainly is a light in the darkness. Thank you. I mean, I think it is, I can say it's a very complicated subject, and it's a very complicated, the complicated, messy nature of the story is something that I struggled with

until I hit upon having the structure of the book so closely follow the complexity of the object because one could not write a linear narrative about this and one could not present it as a simple A then B then C then D like most interesting things like our own bodies and histories and civilizations, everything is intimately connected to everything else.

John Muir famously said, when you start pulling on one thread, you end up pulling up the whole universe. And it's very much the case in the context of this book. There is a great conflict that you document extremely well in the book, the seeming contradiction of NASA's, they were nearly disgusted with ILC or Playtex's ability to meet the agency's strict paperwork requirements, because this was system management at its core. And yet at the same time, they were thrilled with the product. They were thrilled with the spacesuit. It didn't sink in, it seems, for a long time that they were dealing with something that maybe their precious systems management approach didn't encompass. Well, I will maybe play against type here by...

Am I being too kind to play tricks? No, no. I would just speak up actually for systems management for a moment, because systems management was a kind of miraculous and amazing thing when it happened. And it happened in the context of America's efforts to build the first intercontinental ballistic missiles. And Convair, who is the contractor charged with building the first of those, the Atlas missile, had enormous difficulties. That was the most complex thing that humans had ever made, more complex than the atomic bomb at the most complex thing that humans had ever made, more complex than the atomic bomb at the time.

And they had all these issues, for example, with the speed of a gyroscope in the guidance system being the same as the turbofan delivering fuel to the rocket and cancelling each other out, or basically rocket after rocket exploded for unaccepted reasons. And then this led to this incredible conceptual shift whereby Shriver, Rameau, and Wooldridge invented this way of thinking about the world that was not to do with objects. Objects had previously been all the military ever contracted for,

but rather a system of interlinked, what they called black boxes, because it didn't matter what was happening inside of each subsystem or each component. It mattered much more their relationships to each other. And in the contemporaneous proposal for America's first comprehensive nuclear air defense system against Soviet bombers, the so-called Valley Report, the word system was so unusual in the English language, the historian Thomas Hughes points out when he writes about it, that a page-long definition had to be applied. or Hamilton Standard or Grumman or North American Aviation constantly articulate all these pieces of this complex system in terms of their relationships to all the other parts.

It's the only thing that allowed us to get to the moon in organizational terms. The problem was when you started when this, not with the ability of systems engineering to master complex technological problems and artifacts, the problem was when it came up against the surface of the body. So one of the biggest, most literal conflicts between ILC and NASA was usually in a systems engineering process, when you modify something like a pump or a transistor,

you have to re-serialize it, hand in a bunch of forms to say, this component has changed and its relationships to other components have changed. And that is the right thing to do in the context of a complex engineering process. The problem is when you're tailoring a suit and all the spacesuits were custom tailored for each astronaut and the astronaut gets a little chubby or he loses weight or the... Or he just says, this is chafing now, it didn't use the chafe before. Exactly. And so when all those things happen, you have to be constantly modifying it,

and you're not able to do so in the systems engineering context without filing a form every time you do. And so this conflict was finally resolved, and it went on over years, by the ILC just broadly designating each component of each suit for each astronaut, small, medium, or large, except for the urinary collection device so great which after a quote-unquote incident with the first astronaut fitted with sized large extra large extra extra large true story so so I would say that the the important lesson is not that systems engineering is not a great way to solve problems that relate to the complexities of

technological artifacts and how they relate to each other. The problem is when those technological systems start to relate to, start to become deeply enmeshed with human systems and social systems. And we see this today in the way in which a technological system like Facebook, optimized for one purpose, for the collection and distribution of information and advertising, like Facebook, optimized for one purpose, for the collection and distribution of information and advertising, wreaks havoc in a larger, complex social system because it was not, you know, being optimized for that, for all the technological parts. Working together is not the same as being able to work robustly in a larger social and cultural context.

What a wonderful example. And I certainly didn't mean to be knocking systems engineering for those tasks that it is appropriate for. Interesting that you point out in the book, and very oddly, that this use of the word system up until systems engineering, systems management, had largely only been confined to descriptions of the human organism, the circulatory system, the nervous system. So interesting that it then was adopted for these other more mechanical systems. Yes. The story of systems engineering, and it's at the scale of the body in the case of something like the cyborg proposal at the scale of the city, as in Rand and Lytton and others' urban proposals in the late 1960s, is really the story of not just if you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but if you find yourself with a miraculous hammer, you just want to find all the nails you can. Especially the problem of the city, which was seen along with space exploration,

along with Vietnam, as the major problem of 1960s American society. Vietnam as the major problem of 1960s American society, you can really understand in retrospect why these seemingly miraculous methods were leaned upon very hard to try to somehow sort out what seemed like another complex systems of feedback and inputs and outputs. It could not have been more well-meaning. Yeah. When we came in, when the power was still working in our tent here at the Earth Planetary Festival, there was an image on the big flat screen behind us, which you also have in the book. And it is one that is near and dear to space geeks like me.

And it came out of that great Gerard K. O'Neill study of cities in space at the L5, the Lagrange Point. It is this wonderful place where who wouldn't want to live there? And it's all these modular structures, and there are parks, and growing things everywhere. And it makes you think, yes, this is the ultimate expression of applying systems engineering to human society. And it has now made me think, huh, better take that with several grains of salt. Several grains of space salt. No, that's a fascinating story. I have a student,

in fact, working on those images right now as part of her PhD dissertation because they are such an amazing example of what NASA had to do in the 1970s after Apollo, which was with no, with the space shuttle program delayed and with nothing spectacular to show, a lot of these studies and more speculative proposals were made to almost hold out to us what could be achieved if we continue to invest in space exploration in the way that Cold War pressures had made us do in the 1960s. But there's a really particular irony, which I, the reason why the image exploration in the way that Cold War pressures had made us do in the 1960s. But there's a really particular irony, the reason why the image is in the book, which is that when he was director of research and technology for the Department of Housing and

Urban Development, Howard Finger, who is a nuclear propulsion engineer, had actually designed the spaceship on which the 2001's Discovery was based. Yes. He supervised this program called Operation Breakthrough, which was an attempt to use all the expertise of these aerospace companies that were not getting new contracts because of the Vietnam War and the end of Apollo construction to build something that we also see technology companies like Google talking about today, which is mass-produced prefabricated housing to solve America's urban problems at one fell swoop. And many of these Operation Breakthrough projects

were actually built and prototyped around the United States, around 10, and they were enormously problematic. And the General Accounting Office cited the Operation Breakthrough as a failure in a 1972 study of all those investments. But that didn't stop Operation Breakthrough's aerospace-inflected, prefabricated housing being selected by the AIMS summer study as the perfect material to build this city and space from. So all of those amazing suburban patios that you see arcing up in the Curve Station are, in fact, not just coming home to roost because they have their own origins in the application of systems engineering from aerospace into questions of housing and humanity. Still a beautiful image, you have to admit.

It's amazing. Let's bring it back down to the scale of we individual humans again. You already mentioned this term cyborg. Yes. You have a layer, fascinating, that talks about essentially what may have been the invention of psychopharmacology and this these two guys who I came to think of as sort of the odd couple who worked at, of all places, a mental hospital. Yes, one of the largest mental hospitals in the country, the Rockland State Psychiatric Institute across the Hudson River from New York above New Jersey on the Palisades. There was and still is an enormous state mental hospital where throughout the 1940s and 1950s there were

hundreds and thousands of patients with schizophrenia, with clinical depression, who could not be treated. The director of research at that hospital, Nathan S. Klein, worked with a young analog computing researcher, Manfred S. Klein, on a 1958 study for the Air Force. And they were coming off of Klein's introduction. He was not the sole founder of modern psychopharmacology, but he was one of them. He tested the first antipsychotic, antiskizofrenic,

and antidepressive drugs in the United States and was instrumentally responsible for the vast deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals that happened at that time. Again, if you've got a miraculous hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so the ability to suddenly, I mean, these intractable mental problems that had tortured humanity for all of history, suddenly being solved by a pill, it seemed amazing. Clines and Klein, and they often get confused with each other

because their names are so similar, were invited into an immediate post-Sputnik symposium by the Air Force to think about how to put humans in space. And with this amazing success of psychopharmacology behind them, they actually proposed that humankind be mechanically, but also primarily chemically altered to allow us to enter outer space. And this generated a lot of publicity. Klein was also very good at publicity and was picked up in 1961 by Life magazine, who published this amazing spread of a metallic skinned,

drug pump filled cyborg. And they invented the word cyborg for the purpose of this Air Force study gallivanting on the surface of the moon. No spacesuit needed because you had become the spacesuit. Because you had become the spacesuit. And so it really was this, very much this cybernetic and systems engineering lens applied directly to the human body and all our

systems that were seen as too weak or too unprepared for the rigors of outer space would simply be upgraded, just like you upgraded all the parts of a nuclear weapon in the context of the contemporaneous arms race. I wasn't going to bring it up, but there is this horrifyingly sexist cartoon that you include. Describe that. Oh, well, interestingly, in the context of the Air Force study, not in a later publication, the Air Force was particularly worried about sexual urges in space.

And when the article was published, this was kind of weirdly accompanied by a cartoon of a doctor with a syringe chasing a caveman ogling looking astronaut who's running after a young woman in a very tight spacesuit. The caption is something like a fanciful vision of chemotherapeutic control of sexual urges in space. But digging into a little bit, of course, there was no, this was exactly the same moment that NASA was adamant that the first astronauts would be male and that all of the crews, both of the civilian space program and the military manned orbiting laboratory that was also being planned at the same time, would also all be male. So it doesn't take much imagination to see that what they were really worried about was men loving each other in space.

Can't help that. Or somehow that, you know, in the extreme conditions, these very masculine men would somehow be transformed. And so, you know, it is a really interesting picture of the social and very both sexist and homophobic backgrounds of that culture at that time. I want to shift direction again and come back to where we started, with the concept of fashion in its use as a noun. Did Christian Dior's fashion leadership in the mid-20th century, in a sense, indirectly create the space for creation of what became the successful Apollo spacesuit?

for creation of what became the successful Apollo spacesuit. Christian Dior was a kind of landmark, not only in fashion, but in the psyche of the post-war American society. Because Christian Dior, with his new look of 1947, which of course was not actually a new look, it was a kind of revision of styles from pre-1930s sort of austerity. Christian Dior's new look was so impactful because of all of the media mechanisms that had built up during and after the Second World War and the new look and the idea of it took the world by storm. Couture

fashion was previously a very small media event but the new look blew the doors off and was a global phenomenon. Then the phrase new look came to be applied to everything that all the incredible transformations of post-war life to do with technology, to do with the reorganization of society. And so in the book, I talk about something that was called at the time, the new look in defense planning. And it was called the new look in defense planning when it was presented to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And not your phrase. This is how it was described by these defense officials. Exactly. So they were borrowing explicitly from Dior, just in the way in which

Dior's New Look was seen to reinvent everything about the female body. The New Look in Defense Planning was seen to reinvent the military in the context of the Korean War, in the context of Eisenhower's fear that we would get mired in a bunch of enormous investments in research and technology, the first of which was the ICBM program. Of course, that also led a genie out of the bottle that Eisenhower was the first to warn us of in his last speech in office, the military-industrial complex, or what I learned he actually wanted to call the military-industrial complex, or what I learned, he actually wanted to call the military-industrial academic complex, but that was seen as too long by his speechwriter. So this enormous self-sustaining R&D apparatus that then did end up fighting a proxy war, but not a proxy war in Southeast Asia, but a proxy war in the context of the space race,

because the ability to deliver an astronaut with precision to orbit war in the context of the space race, because the ability to deliver an astronaut with precision to orbit or to the surface of the moon was a direct, not even analog, it was literally utilizing the same technologies that would deliver a thermonuclear warhead precisely to the footsteps of the Kremlin or the lawn of the White House. And so the proxy war of the space race resulted, which, of course, it was much better in many ways. Of course, nobody died except for a few very heroic astronauts. And we got an enormous set of investments in R&D and technology that allow us to be talking to each other today over the internet and over a whole range of automated systems. But it was still, in some ways, a very brutal war

when it came to the enormous expenditures and the decisions that were made to invest, not so much even in the space program, but in this enormous military-industrial burden of the mid-century, high-technology, deadly force that is still hanging with us today. Yes, largely still with us today. And you bring a light to this, which this is a topic, particularly as it applies to the space race that we have talked about many times on this program. But you do bring an angle to this that had not occurred to me until reading the book.

There is another side to what Christian Dior helped to generate, and that is that with the new look, there was a need for, in a sense, a new generation of foundational garments. Yes. And Playtex was right there. Right. Dior said, without foundations, there is no fashion. And he didn't mean buildings. He meant girdles and bras to a lesser extent.

And so, in fact, it was replacing much heavier corsets and other female undergarments that the Playtex rubber girdle was seen as modern, was seen as revolutionary, was seen as the literal foundation of the new look. So the interesting part of the story is that it connects there as well through a very different circuit. And helped to put Playtex in the position just because of their success where Spinel, the founder, was able to say, I want to be a part of helping this country reach space.

Yes, and he was a consummate patriot, a Russian refugee who addressed his employees every Friday through a PA address from his home in New Jersey, which is now the governor's mansion, to the desks and shop floors of all the Playtex facilities. So he's quite a character in this history as well. You mentioned it earlier, but I would love for you to talk a little bit more about the Playtex workforce. Because these spacesuits, their 21 layers of fabric, are such wonderful examples of craftsmanship, or perhaps I should say craftswomanship. Yes. Because these were the best seamstresses Playtex could find.

Yes. And so one of my, right up there with the delight of interviewing actual Apollo astronauts was the delight of interviewing the seamstresses from the Playtex shop floor, many of whom, especially at the time when I was doing interviews in 2006 and 2007, were still sewing spacesuits for ILC Dover. ILC Dover split off from the larger, or made its own division within the larger conglomerate that bought the International Latex Corporation in the late 1960s, split off from Playtex. All the seamstresses that worked for ILC Dover had been acquired from the Playtex shop floor before that institutional division.

And they were not just manufacturing personnel, they were really partners in the design of the suit. Because while the engineers who worked for Playtex, including the incredible figure of Len Shepard, who, while he had admittedly dropped out of MIT, got his job at Playtex because he was Abram Spinell's television repairman. Yes. Didn't he also spend weeks learning how to sew from these seamstresses? Yes, he would sit with them. He never sewed the suits himself, but he would sit with them. He would try out the machines and try out what it felt like. And there was an enormous back and forth. So Roberta Pilkington, one of the seamstresses I talked to,

described late nights and early mornings sitting with Len Shepard going back and forth about how a certain set of fabric assemblies could or couldn't go together or could be attached or couldn't be attached. And so along with the stories revealed through the book Hidden Figures, my largest delight in the book is surfacing and explaining the enormous contribution that these seamstresses, none of whom went to college, all of whom had entered into a factory job that ended up being far more astonishing and amazing than they ever imagined.

I remember also talking to one seamstress who, when a fault appeared with one of the Apollo 14 gloves, and a fault also appeared with a backup glove kept on site in Cape Canaveral, she had to fly in the backseat of a T-38 Navy trainer from Delaware down to Cape Canaveral with a third glove that she'd put together in her lap. And this is someone who'd not only never been on a plane before, but never left the state of Delaware. And when you think about touching that history, I mean literally touching the surface of the moon through that glove and what it means, it's a remarkable story and one I was really, really glad to be able to

tell. I hope these women are as justifiably proud as they should be. They are. You talk to them. They are not shy about what they consider their contribution to this history is. And as I think I try and talk about in the whole book, it was a particularly distinctive contribution because everyone else working on the spacecraft and its systems allowed vehicles to go into space. Many of them, through their work on those vehicles, allowed human beings to be sustained

by air and pressure in space. But only the seamstresses of the International Latex Corporation really allowed man to walk on the surface of the moon. Like those layers that these women were assembling in such painstaking detail, the 21 layers, the layers of your book all contribute to the whole very, very well. One of the ones that, we won't take long to talk about this, but was utterly fascinating to me,

was about JFK, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who, because I had not read a bio of him before, I had no idea. Yes, I knew he had back trouble and he had other problems, but this was a very unhealthy man. And yet he exuded confidence, virility, everything that maybe most Americans were looking for in a leader. That brings us back to a point that I'm glad to return to because I didn't probably emphasize it enough earlier that one of the essential stories of the Apollo program is the story of media. And in the chapter on JFK, I make the case that because of his very damaged body

and because of his own very successful efforts to hide his health problems from the world and to always present himself, it meant he was quintessentially conscious of appearances. He changed his shirt three times a day so to always look completely crisp and fresh and prepared. And he understood, therefore, intuitively the role and the changing role of media in political life, not only within the United States through his very effective campaigning, but globally. And he understood when he committed, it doesn't diminish his commitment to put an American on the surface of the moon by the end of the 1960s, to say that he understood quintessentially that this was a question of producing a single image, a television image of an American on the surface of the moon

that would be broadcast to hundreds of millions of people around the globe and definitively establish the United States' supremacy in the space race. There is another of these layers in which you talk about how, over time, the limits of human physical endurance were established and that this was very important but that it was already very well established by the time humans started going into space. Yes, and this is an amazing story. This is the story of John Paul Stapp after which the unit of deceleration on the human

body, the StAP, is indeed. There's also a probably apocryphal story, but potentially true, that STAP invented Murphy's Law as a way to talk about an observation that was already common, that technology often didn't work like it was supposed to. At the same time as the Air Force, who is STAP's employer, was commissioning clients inclined to think about modifying the human body in space. Stapp, thinking about high-altitude flight and space missions, understood on his own that the fundamental issue would not be altering man for space, but altering the technologies of rockets and acceleration so that they fit within the parameters of man.

And he discovered that the Air Force didn't know fundamentally those parameters. There had been some tests on endurance and acceleration in the context of the Second World War, but they weren't comprehensive and scientific. And so he really stole away to a corner of Edwards Air Force Base and sort of disguised this effort under his own initiative to accelerate and decelerate first animals, under his own initiative, to accelerate and decelerate first animals, and then his own body as an experimental subject, to discover precisely the limits of acceleration, of de-acceleration, of rotation, of all the things that the human body could withstand,

and which then became literally part of the operational parameters of American rockets, as they were modified from ICBMs to become Mercury and Gemini boosters, and then, of course, of the great Saturn V and the Apollo hardware as well. You've been very generous with your time. I cannot let the conversation end, though, before mentioning someone that has come up on this program before, a personal hero of mine, and in many ways, the inventor of the spacesuit. And you know who I'm talking about. Wiley Post. Wiley Post is a remarkable figure and not enough understood in the context of this history.

Although I did have the distinct pleasure about a year ago helping someone I'm delighted to call a friend, Adam Savage, produce a precise reproduction of Wiley Post's pressure chute as it was designed and built by B.F. Goodrich's Russell Culley for one of his Comic-Con adventures, as he called it the deepest cut of his spacesuit collection. And Wiley Post was a remarkable figure. He lost his eye in an oil rig accident and used the settlement money to buy his first airplane. And then he became famous in the 1930s for

a series of flights which circled the globe in an attempt to prove that the airplane, and not the Zeppelin, competing Zeppelin at the time, was the future to long distance air travel, passenger air travel. And he made his first flight with a navigator, then he had a mechanical navigator. He was the first to discover jet lag as he flew around the world and note the reaction of his body to changing time zones quickly. He was a friend with Will Rogers. The two, of course, tragically died together in a boating accident in Alaska. But before that time, he had also discovered the jet stream flying high as the jet stream, the great west to east current of air that circles the northern

hemisphere and then he discovered that if he went up to fly in the jet stream he could set much faster transcontinental and flight records but the jet stream starts at about 38,000 feet which is above the 37,000 feet Armstrong line named after an Air Force doctor who discovered, who first named the altitude at which blood begins to boil at body temperature. And so what Wiley Post would do would be fly up, just skirting into the jet stream until the, literally, this is kind of gross, but until the blood coming from his eyes and his nostrils would get too bothersome, and then he would come down and then go up again.

And so in order to be able to fly comfortably at these altitudes, instead of pressurizing his aircraft, which was at the time, certainly out of his financial and logistical needs, would have made it too heavy. And planes were still being made out of things like canvas. Yes, canvas and wood. He asked B.F. Goodrich to make what he called a tire in the shape of a man because the main problem of a spacesuit, many of your audience already know this, but just to make it clear because the main problem of a spacesuit many of your audience already know this but just to to make it clear the main problem of a spacesuit is to not to protect the body from scrapes or abrasions like clothing

it's to provide a pressurized environment so that our blood doesn't boil so we can continue to operate and breathe as we do here on earth but the problem of a spacesuit is that much like a highly inflated basketball, it wants to be both round and very hard. And so collapsing that basketball into the shape of a human body is enormously difficult, especially in a way that allows us to continue to move within it. Post's first tire-like suit only had enough mobility for him to barely move the joystick. You can see amazing photos of him sort of lumbering. It was sewn into a seated position and he would sort of lumber into the aircraft when he may. But then he used it to set several records and was aiming for around the world record when

unfortunately he died in this tragic accident. But it was also the first spacesuit to appear on film in the 1935 movie Air Hawks where... You have a poster from the film. Okay, yeah, where Post played himself helping the main character protect against, I think, an evil death ray that was being projected from the ground. An electric death ray. Okay, yes. I'm sure they all are. Yes.

A wonderful, wonderful character. Yes. Every layer in this book, spacesuit, fashion, and Apollo, is worthy of a book unto itself. But it is marvelously assembled into this whole, which I think is even greater than those parts. I did not mention before, it is still available from MIT Press, right? In fact, you're going to be selling and signing copies here at Interplanetary Festival. And I hope that we will have a copy to give away in our space trivia contest here on Planetary Radio. Oh, fantastic. That would be a great pleasure. I got one other question. Yes.

If systems engineering is not the right answer for approaching tasks, challenges that are intimately tied to human nature. What is the best of it? Well, I wouldn't even go so far to say that systems engineering is not the right answer, but I think what the Apollo Space Suit provides a marvelous example of is of a kind of soft mediation between the logic of technology and the logic of human systems. And so all around the world, wearing my other hat, for example, as an urban designer, I worked with Louis Spettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute on a project about data collection

in slums around the world, sponsored by the Gates Foundation and Slum Drawers and Shack Drawers International, where we were reappropriating and reusing the techniques of military industrial mapping for these communities to show the local governments where they were, that they exist, and the exact geometry of all their houses. And this is a technology that comes directly from targeting and guidance systems from the 1950s. And it's not that it's not a good technology, it's just that we have to be thoughtful and careful about how we use it and the purposes to which we use it.

So I would say that the spacesuit is a triumph of systems engineering, but a triumph of its mediation, a mediation between the logic of the larger systems of Apollo and the logic of the human body. And it is neither one nor the other, but something that exists between the two,

which the best human spaces and human cities actually are. A complex, robust, and organic solution. Yes, exactly. Nicholas, this has been absolutely delightful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Keep up the great work. Oh, absolutely.

Look forward to it. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Batts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society and the program manager for LightSail, the whole LightSail program. But right now, the only one we care about is LightSail 2. Welcome back. You want to give us a little status report? Sure. We're still up there in orbit doing our thing, continuing to raise the the apogee the high point in the orbit

by solar sailing we continue to try to improve our performance by working on different ways to use the momentum wheel we use to turn it because we're having still having issues with the momentum wheel and saturating but uh anyway it's still it's working and and it's still doing what it's supposed to do. And we're still, we're trying to get to where we can download some more pictures, which I like, and it's all good. Speaking of light sail and pictures from it, we'll come back to that in the contest today, unless you have something prior to that planned for us. But first tell us about the night sky. The easy planets to see, still Jupiter and Saturn in the south or southwest in the early evening. Jupiter, brighter than any star out there, kind of near Antares, the much dimmer but still kind of bright star in Scorpius.

And then Saturn over to their left, looking yellowish and kind of bright. You still might be able to catch Mercury in the pre-dawn, very low in the east, although it's going to be tough. And you still might, although it's going to be tough, pick up some Perseid meteor showers. The peak was on the 12th and 13th, but it spread over a couple weeks before and after you get increased meteor activity. So you can try that while you're out looking for LightSail 2. On to this week in space history. 1977, Voyager 2 was launched, and it's still working. Yeah, we're going to have to have a show about that once again. It's good to check in at least once every couple of years as they head out into interstellar space. I expect nothing less from LightSail 2.

Just keep raising that apogee. Yeah, I don't think so, I think. Yeah. It'll come to a glorious and fiery end. All right, we move on to random space fact. I like it. Edwin Hubble. He proved evidence that the universe was expanding, known as Hubble's Law.

Although, although the law effectively had been proposed and demonstrated observationally two years earlier by, and I apologize, I can't pronounce French worth a darn, Georges Lememaître. And so it's sometimes called the Hubble Lemaître law. It talks about the expansion of the universe. have it secondhand, no more distant than that, that he was a real jerk. But nevertheless, he was a great astronomer. So there you go. Shall we move on to the trivia contest? Absolutely. Would that make you happy? It would. I asked you in my fit of LightSail 2 euphoria, in the-resolution image downlinked and released after SAIL deployment from LightSail 2, what is the most obvious strip of land? How did we do, Matt? Not only did we get the right answer from just about everybody, but almost everybody also had

congratulations for the society, for you, for the LightSail 2 team. It was just delightful to read all of these. Of course, I can't read all of them as part of the radio show, but here's one. It happens to be from our winner, Gene Lewin at Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington. I think we read his response last week because it was entertaining. He said it's Baja, California that LightSail 2 was looking down on when it took that image. That is indeed correct. Congratulations, Gene. He adds it's Baja, California that LightSail 2 was looking down on when it took that image. That is indeed correct. Congratulations, Gene. He adds it is fantastic to be a small part of this endeavor,

which tells me that he either is a donor to the LightSail program or may be a member of the Planetary Society. He says, sail on. We will keep sailing on, And thanks to him and everyone else who made this mission possible. Gene, we're going to send you a priceless Planetary Society kick asteroid, rubber asteroid, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account from that worldwide network of telescopes that you can operate remotely from any place. And how appropriate, Voyager's greatest hits, eight tracks for the epic trek to interstellar space by Alexandra Tsai,

or Tsai, I still haven't checked the correct pronunciation of her name. Sorry, Alexandra. Terrific book. We'll send it out from headquarters. And I got some other stuff, of course. Sean Young in South Africa, he says, I only found out about the Planetary Society and Planetary Radio about three months ago, started listening to podcasts from episode one. He's one of those. He said, I just listened to the podcast from 2005, the coverage of Cosmos One, that launch. And he said, just found out this week that LightSail 2 was just launched. How exciting. Yeah, we think so.

We do. And this has gone much better than the rocket failure of Cosmos One. No comparison. Well, there is a comparison, but it's pretty. Comparison. Well, there is a comparison, but it's pretty... Kevin Nitka, Forked River, New Jersey. Kapla, which I think means success in Klingon. It's either that or a version of my name in Klingon. Congratulations for a successful mission. Well done.

That photo is proudly presented as my lock screen picture. Live long on photons. Light sail. And we got a couple of other people who said they've made that image their wallpaper or whatever for their phone or device. A little twist on that. Brian Mangold in Arizona. He says, I think my home is just visible in the gap between the sails. Beautiful, stunning image. Congrats to all of you for making Sagan's et al dream come true. Finally, Craig Balog in New Jersey. Since light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave, would it also be appropriate to say LightSail 2 was light surfing over Baja, California?

Shaka prah, dude. Light sail is a surfer, not a hoedad. Boy, there's a blast in the past. We're ready to go on. Wow. That's a lot to take in. I'll say. All right.

So back to Edwin Hubble. Jerk, great astronomer, man about town, whatever he was, what was Edwin Hubble's middle name? That's the really important question. And that's the one you'll need to answer at planetary.org slash radio contest. You have this time until the 21st. That would be Wednesday, August 21st at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. Speaking of blasts from the past, here's something for you. How about a Planetary Radio t-shirt? Yay!

It's been ages, absolutely ages. We'll throw in an asteroid as well, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net account. Not a bad package and not a bad segment. Thanks very much. We're done. All right. Thank you, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky. Think about something shiny that makes you happy.

Thank you, and good night. And check out on planetary.org to see how you can see that shiny thing, if you're lucky, pass right over your head. That's Bruce Betts. He should know, he's the program manager for LightSail and chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary

Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its fashionable members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan at Astra.