During the 1950s and 1960s, a spinoff branch of ILC was the largest producer of shapewear, or foundation garments, such as bras and girdles, in the United States, selling under a name you may recognize: Playtex!
The full story of the Playtex Moon suits will make you LOL.
In short, they worked on them for almost 3 years and failed. NASA canceled the contract and put it back out to bid with Playtex not invited. Playtex submitted anyway, two weeks late, and passed only 12 of the 22 tests. Of course Playtex won. They went to work with a skeleton crew of 12, and a couple of months later... voila! Working Moon suit! Good old American... ingenuity? No, I think "lying" was the word I was looking for.
What's interesting is that you can see this was written up in a mainstream outlet fairly recently for everyone to see. My point here is that you can lay it out and people still don't "see" it for themselves, and that phenomenon is actually more important than phony Moon suits.
I'm still struggling with how zippers and stitched seams can hold up to the vacuum of space. What a joke LOL!
Playtex won the suit stand-off with ease, passing 12 of the 22 tests. NASA declared there wasn’t a second-place finisher.
I've done engineering projects for big corporations involving lots of validation testing. Random vibration, dust ingress, cycling, thermal shock, etc... And even they weren't okay with bending the rules that far. Only exception I got was a failed drop test.
Weren't the old-school spacesuits from Playtex or some other "foundation garment" company?
https://exhibitions.fitnyc.edu/expedition/tag/international-latex-corporation/
HAHA didn't know that
The full story of the Playtex Moon suits will make you LOL.
In short, they worked on them for almost 3 years and failed. NASA canceled the contract and put it back out to bid with Playtex not invited. Playtex submitted anyway, two weeks late, and passed only 12 of the 22 tests. Of course Playtex won. They went to work with a skeleton crew of 12, and a couple of months later... voila! Working Moon suit! Good old American... ingenuity? No, I think "lying" was the word I was looking for.
How Playtex Helped Win the Space Race (Mental Floss 7/18/2016)
What's interesting is that you can see this was written up in a mainstream outlet fairly recently for everyone to see. My point here is that you can lay it out and people still don't "see" it for themselves, and that phenomenon is actually more important than phony Moon suits.
I'm still struggling with how zippers and stitched seams can hold up to the vacuum of space. What a joke LOL!
I've done engineering projects for big corporations involving lots of validation testing. Random vibration, dust ingress, cycling, thermal shock, etc... And even they weren't okay with bending the rules that far. Only exception I got was a failed drop test.