When NASA made the first space suits, how did they know what space would be like? I.e., how did they know what to put on the suits?
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It was theorized to be a vacuum hundreds of years before we went to space. We can also produce vacuum chambers here on earth to design and test such a suit.
Keep in mind we’ve been making pressurized suits for several decades before space flight including for deep sea diving.
Also, they didn’t so much have to worry about the suits as they did the capsule…. The first several manned missions were just simple orbit and reentry missions. The astronauts weren’t fitted with equipment meant for space walks. I imagine they conducted plenty of experiments before hand using probes and lab equipment but honestly, I don’t imagine it would be such a guessing game if you can figure out how to keep oxygen in, bad gases out, cool/warm air in, extreme hot/cold out you’re already well on your way. If you can build a suitable capsule you can build an adequate suit. Those first capsules containing humans were scary af to be honest! Compared to modern equipment its like they grabbed an aluminum garbage can, strapped a casio calculater inside, bolted a rocket to the bottom and duct taped a dude inside.
They had sent numerous unmanned probes into space, animal missions with bio-metric sensors on the animals, and 1000s of very high altitude flights to collect data.
They had a great idea of the space environment and how to build a suitable suit. It was the micro gravity that was more of an unknown.
Short time periods in space isn’t actually that taxing from a materials/engineering perspective. Getting there, getting back, or staying for a long time is the motherfucker.
NASA didn’t make the first space suit. And actually the Russians were the first to send a man into space not America. The origins of the pressure suit are below.
Captain hawthorn c grey made a high altitude balloon flight and died. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_C._Gray
Following this another pioneer of flight Wiley Post developed the first pressure suit based on a diving suit in an attempt to fly higher and faster. Picture of him in the first pressure suit attached https://imgur.com/U5P43Sz
We’ve known since antiquity that space was a vacuum. We’ve been able to directly measure the temperature and pressure environment in space since the late 1940’s through both sending rockets and high-altitude jet test pilots. We sent probes into space since the late 1950’s. There really wasn’t anything we didn’t know about how to make a functional (if not optimal) space suit by the early 1950’s because, again, we had high-altitude test pilots flying jets in what were essentially space suits by that time.
The first NASA space site was not designed by them but US Navy used it in high altitude fighters.
Direct observation of what flight in high altitude and the effect of it started with balloon flight in 1862 was one of the crew lost continues because of low air pressure. Pressure suit has been used in flight in 1920 and was developed a lot during WWII
The idea of a vacuum is space is from the 13th century in western science and confirmed by Newtonian mechanics, it has been suggested by ancient greeks. That vacuum kill an animal when the first vacuum pump was invented in the 1650s
So the problem has been known for centuries and people have made a pressure suit that works in space for a couple of decades for high altitude flight. So before we launched anything into space and got direct measurements for there.
They had been sending sounding rockets, probes, and experiments into space since basically the end of WW2. The German V-2 actually left the major part of the atmosphere when bombing England.
Finally, they actually used modified weather balloons to send Joseph Kittinger to the edge of space to test a spacesuit. He held the record for highest free fall skydive until Felix Baumgartner broke it with Red Bulls help.
Worth noting that the first spacesuits were hand sewn and custom tailored by the Playtex Corporation, the people who make women’s lingerie and underwear. They were the only ones that could make a suit to the tolerances demanded by NASA. Stitches that were 1/32nd of an inch, consistently, through 21 layers of cloth and rubber…all over the length and breadth of an entire suit. And although it got spun off into its own division, the same company still makes them.
I visited the governors mansion in New Jersey. It was once owned by the owner of playtex.The guide told us the story of a man being the paper boy to someone I believe owned Kodak company. The Kodak man paid for the paperboy to become a mechanical engineer. Somehow the young engineer started playtex. Then he won the contest to make the space suit. He felt that was the reason he was born.
We didn’t make the leap into vacuum all at once. That gave us a lot of time to experience harsher and harsher conditions. Airplanes in the 1950’s went higher and higher, which started to require pressurized and insulated suits. These suits eventually became very like space suits as planes started flying very high in thin atmosphere.
So by the time we started going into space, we were pretty good at building pressurized, air-tight suits. The work we had to do was adapting to other aspects of space travel besides the lack of air.
Fighter airplane pilots sit in a seat and don’t move much beyond their hands and feet. For early space flights where the crew just sat in a capsule, the space suits were similar to the airplane suits. When astronauts started doing space walks and then moon walks, the suits needed to be redesigned to allow for more movement of the arms, legs and torso. Moon suits also need to be tough as they are exposed to very abrasive moon dust and rocks which might damage a fragile suit. Suits also need to help regulate the temperature of the wearer. The extreme heat and cold of outer space require a much more sophisticated temperature system than the suits worn by airplane pilots, where the airplane provided a lot of the temperature regulation.
NASA went through a lot of iterations of test suits, with tests being performed by astronauts walking in the desert to simulate rugged moon conditions, or underwater in a pool to simulate weightlessness.
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