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?
In: Technology
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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