Rerun: Space Suit Evolution

in quite some time. At least that's the plan. The four people include Jared Isaacman he is the billionaire founder of Shift four, Scott Petite, Ann Menon, and Sarah Gillis. Now, these four private astronauts are planning on going up into this very high orbit, as I mentioned before. But the thing I think is really audacious and ambitious is that the plan is for this to become the first private space expedition that will include EVAs extra vehicular activities or

space walks in the common parlance. And obviously that's a huge deal. Like to go out into space with nothing but a spacesuit to protect you from the fact that, as I have mentioned many times before in this and other podcasts, the fact that space is always trying to kill you. So I think that's a really exciting goal. And it made me think of an episode that we

published back in twenty twenty one. And because I'm working on a few other episodes right now that are taking up a lot of time because there's just a lot of research to read through, I thought we could revisit that episode from twenty twenty one. It published August sixteenth, twenty twenty one, so almost exactly three years ago, just a little more than that now, and it is titled

Space Suit Evolution I hope you enjoy. Back in March of twenty twenty, just as we were starting to go into a work from home phase, I published the episode about the Artemis program, you know, the one that I actually ran last week, So if you if you did miss it back in March twenty twenty, we ran it

again last week. And that might have even been the very first episode that published after our office closed, because it published on March sixteenth, twenty twenty, and from a desk calendar that refuses to change, I know the last day that most people were in the office was March thirteenth,

twenty twenty. Anyway, in that episode, in case you didn't listen to the rerun from last week, I described the goals in the purpose of NASA's Artemis program, which includes a return to the Moon, and I'm sure that I mentioned probably moreultiple times that it was an incredibly aggressive goal, one that I was kind of having trouble seeing NASA actually achieve. It just seemed like it was too tough of a thing to do to have it be done

by twenty twenty four. Well, NASA's Office of the Inspector General has outright said that the twenty twenty four goal is unachievable because one of the necessary components, that being a new space suit design, will not be ready until the spring of twenty twenty five at the earliest. That's not the only thing that's going to push that program back,

but it's one of the big ones. So I thought today we would talk a bit about space suits and their history, and then in our next episode we'll continue that and talk about the current project to update space suits and why has it taken so long? Why are we behind schedule? But to start off with, let's talk about why you need a space suit out there in

the first place. Now, those of you have been listening to tech stuff for a while know that I have a saying, Actually I've got a few of them, but one of them is space is trying to kill you all the time. It never rests, and it's always trying to do it. And there are a lot of ways that space is doing this. One is that space, like one of those terrible restaurants, has a complete lack of atmosphere. I mean, like there's no oxygen out there, so you'd

have nothing to breathe. You could pass out within fifteen seconds just from that alone. Beyond that, your blood could boil in space. And that might seem a bit counterintuitive after all, Like if you're talking about deep space, that's cold, right, I mean, like if you're talking about deep deep space you're outside of the Solar System, that would just be a couple of degrees off from absolute zero, which is the coldest temperature possible because at absolute zero, there's no

molecular movement at all. Atoms are just kind of perfectly still. Normally they're vibrating all around the place. So with the temper sure that cold, you would probably expect to freeze rather than to boil. I'll come back to the temperature thing in just a second, but here's the tricky bit. See, for heat to dissipate, you need to have a way to transfer it away from one body to another, and without convection, the heat would tend to stay with you

for a bit. Though you wouldn't stay warm for long. It's just you wouldn't immediately turn into an ice lolly. Now that means you'd have enough body heat to boil off your body fluids and blood. See, the vacuum of space means there's very very low pressure. Right, there's no air pressure in space, and that would reduce the boiling point of the various liquids in your body. And if they're reduced down low enough, it means that your body

heat alone would be enough to boil off those liquids. Now, we can totally simulate this on Earth, though preferably not with a living creature, by putting you a jar of room temperature water in a vacuum chamber and then sucking the air out of the chamber, and you can make water boil at room temperature. This way, the water does not get hotter or anything like that, it just has

a lower boiling point. Actually, the temperature of your blood and body fluids would probably go down as it was boiling, because boiling is an endothermic process and the liquid loses energy in that process. But we'll move on because we got a lot of other stuff to cover in this episode.

So those boiling body fluids and the low pressure environment of space means that all your soft tissues would also start to swell and expand that would be uncomfortable if it were just you know, like your skin and maybe your fat tissue, but it also includes your internal organ so that's you know, inconvenient at best. Now. I also mentioned that, as con said in Star Trek two, it's

very cold in space, but that's only part partly true. See, if you're exposed to sunlight out in outer space, you could experience temperatures of around one hundred and twenty degrees

celsius or two hundred and forty eight degrees fahrenheit. Now, if you're out of the sun, if you are in you know, the shade in space, that temperature would plunge, though not necessarily all the way down to absolute zero, you know, because we reserve the super cold stuff or deep space, but it would go really low, like more than negative one hundred degrees fahrenheit and that means that you're going to encounter vastly different temperatures and changes in temperature.

Then you've got tiny particles in space that can be moving at incredible speeds. These are micro meteoroids, and they are tiny, but because of momentum, they can pack a huge punch. See that's that classic equation of momentum is mass times velocity, So the mass of a some matter traveling at a specific velocity, which is you know, speed plus direction. So a tiny particle could have very little mass, but if it's traveling fast enough, it carries a heck

of a lot of momentum. I mean, that's the principle behind things like projectile weapons, right. They projectiles don't have a lot of mass, but they move super fast, so they have a lot of momentum and thus they can have a big impact. So you would want to wear something that could offer at least some protection against that kind of stuff. Then you've got the various forms of

radiation that you would encounter in space. Here on Earth we have an atmosphere and a magnetosphere, and together those provide us with some protection against some of the worst radiation out there, like gamma radiation and that kind of thing. But if you're outside of that layer of protection, you need something to keep you safe from deadly radiation or else you could suffer some serious consequences from acute burns

to long term health complications like cancer. So obviously, if you want to visit someplace like the moon, going to need a special suit to provide protection against the multitude of ways space is trying to kill you. The suit needs to be pressurized and allow you to have a breathable atmosphere inside. The suit needs to be able to remove carbon dioxide which we exhale so that we can continue to breathe oxygen and function. It needs to protect

against micro meteoroids at least a little bit. Needs to keep you at a temperature that's not too hot or too cold, even as you exert energy to move around and encounter areas of fluctuating temperatures. Ideally, it also will include systems that let you communicate with other people. After all, because space has a shortage of molecules out there, sound does not travel in space. For sound to travel, molecules

need to vibrate against other molecules. Sound travels through the air through air pressure, fluctuations and that really, when you zoom in on, the whole thing would just be air molecules moving and causing neighboring air molecules to move back and forth at certain frequencies. And some of those frequencies we can observe as sound, We can perceive them. Space does not have that excess of molecules, so there's nothing

to carry sound out there. So we got to have tech systems built into our suits if we want to be able to talk to each other or to people back on Earth. So those are some of the bare minimum requirements that you would want from your spacesuit, you know, assuming you were going to go out into space itself. The earliest spacesuits were a bit simpler than that because they weren't intended to be worn outside of a spacecraft. You know, there was no extra vehicular activity or EVA

in the earliest missions. The spacesuits needed to protect the people in the spacecraft from other potential threats like maybe a fire aboard the spacecraft. They actually evolved from flight suits. So let's start with flight suits and work our way up, all right, So the earliest aviation outfits were for low altitude flying, because that's what the aircraft of the day were capable of so early pilots all the way up into the World War One era would wear some pretty

simple gear. There were a few attempts at creating official pilot uniforms and suits in the early days of World War One, but many pilots chose to go up with their own gear instead, as the suits weren't necessarily a good fit I mean, so to speak, not like literally fit, but like they didn't provide the level of protection against the cold, for example, that a lot of pilots wanted. So this was actually approved by the military. I mean, air combat was so new anyway that it was kind

of the military catching up to technology. Most of the gear, whether it was provided by the military or the pilots themselves, was either repurposed or modified motoring gear, so the kind of stuff that people who were driving automobiles were wearing. So this is where we would get that image of

pilots wearing bomber jackets and baggy trousers. They were practical in that they helped the pilot to stay warm and offered a bit of protection against stuff like you know, debris that you might encounter or oil that was given off by the engine, and for that same reason, pilots typically wore goggles to protect their eyes, and gloves to protect their hands, and helmets to you know, protect their noggins.

This was in the open cockpit days when airplanes did not travel to super high altitudes, so there wasn't really a need for pressurization yet. Also, the temperatures in winter could dip as low as negative thirty five celsius when flying at altitudes of ten to fifteen thousand feet, which was kind of, you know, not uncommon in some parts of the world during World War One, so staying warm

was absolutely vital. Then there was this fella named Sidney Cotton from Australia who helped develop a flight suit that had a fur and air proof silk lining in it to protect against the cold. His design was so well received and it became known as the Sidcot flight suit for Sydney Cotton. It became the standard for the second half of World War One for especially the Royal Air Force, so the sid Cut suits became pretty much universal there.

The first actual flight suit that was made specifically to handle the challenges of flying in a plane at higher altitudes was the product of a pilot named Wiley Post who along with the company BF Goodrich, created this flight suit and the suit was pressurized. It had special arm and leg joints to help the pilot with mobility because when you pressurize a suit, I mean you're kind you're

inflating essentially, is what you're doing. So you have to have some way of dealing with mobility issues because the suit gets stiff because it's like you're inside a giant balloon. And also they connected the suit to a source of liquid oxygen to end up supplying air for the higher altitudes. By World War Two, the nature of air combat had changed and you had bombers that could fly at very

high altitudes. But in the days before pressurized cabins, it meant that the people inside the planes needed to wear special flight suits with electric heating elements in them to fight off the cold at those higher altitudes. And just as a reminder, electric heaters are really simple electronics. Basically, you have a conductor that has a pretty good resistance to electrical flow, and then you try to feed a

current through that conductor. So as electricity tries to flow through this conductor that has high resistance, a lot of that electrical energy converts into heat, and this is the principle behind stuff like electric stovetops and electric toasters. I mean, it's similar to how incandescent light bulbs work in a way as well. And I should add that there was some experimentation with electric heated components even back as far

as World War One, but they were pretty primitive. In addition, they were typically powered by a small windmill generator that could be mounted onto the wing of a plane, and

a normal operation that was fine. But if the pilot ever had to engage in say like a dive, where the velocity of the air going past the plane increased dramatically, well that would coincide with an increased output from the windmill generator, and then you could have way too much voltage being supplied to the heating elements, and the pilot could actually get burned by these components that were meant to keep the pilot warm as they flew, which is

kind of a big yikes. But over time the flight suit evolved, pressurization, heating elements, oxygen supply, protective elements like helmets, and the development of flame retardet materials all became part of the design of flight suits, and post World War Two we entered into an era of new experimentation with regard to high altitude flying and really pushing the limits

of both aircraft and human endurance. Part of that was how human can handle acceleration or G forces, so like G force being in relation to the strength of gravity right at sea level essentially, but one G is one one to one of Earth's gravity. Well, that last bit about, you know, withstanding acceleration was super important because during intense acceleration, humans have a tendency to black out. I mean, obviously, when you're piloting a craft through the air or in space,

that's a bad thing. I mean, it's not really a good thing in any context, I suppose. But what is going on here? Why do we black out at higher accelerations. Well, during those intense accelerations, our blood tends to pool in the lower part of our body, and that means the old brain ain't getting enough of that sweet, sweet oxygen that it craves oh so much. And this can lead to a grayout, which is where your vision starts to diminish, or a full on blackout where you lose your vision

and even a loss of consciousness. Now, the suits developed in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties used various means, such as inflatable bladders that could fill with either air or with water in some cases, to provide pressure on the lower parts of the body and help push back against that tendency for blood to pool in the lower

half of the body. Even so, this typically only allows a pilot to endure a little more acceleration than whatever their natural tolerance is, so that's somewhere in between three

to five times the force of gravity for most people. Interestingly, the development of these components was something of a controversy in that the people who were building the planes, the engineers building planes, were kind of worried that if pilots knew that they could push themselves harder because their suits would allow them to withstand greater acceleration, that they would bloody well go and do that, even if it meant that they were pushing the aircraft beyond its own stress capabilities.

And so some air forces, some you know, some some flight schools and stuff, chose to hold back on incorporating what would become known as G suits for a while in an effort to avoid encouraging pilots to you know, go fast. Oh. Also, interestingly, one person to experiment with g suit development in the early forties was a guy named Frank Cotton from Australia. I say interestingly because if you were listening earlier, you heard me talk about Sydney Cotton,

also from Australia. Who is the fella who came up with that Sidcot suit? So your question is, were Frank and Sydney Cotton related? I have no cotton pick an idea. That was a long way to go for something that wasn't even quite a joke. In fact, I think it was long enough where we all need to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. So by the nineteen fifties, the flight suit had evolved into gear that was meant to provide various types of protection to pilots.

With the creation of pressurized cabins with climate control, some of the stuff was less important, right, Some of the pressurization things and the heat elements weren't as important and

didn't need to be incorporated into some flight suits. But flight suits still needed to be flame resistant, they needed to allow for mobility, and they needed to provide protection in the event that a pilot needed to eject from their aircraft, and also for anything that was involving a lot of like intense acceleration, you needed to have that G suit protection. But now let's move on to space suits, because,

as I said earlier, they evolved from flight suits. The space race that got started in the nineteen fifties was really an extension of the Cold War and a race between the United States and the then Soviet Union to reach certain milestones before the other could, all while also demonstrating a technological capability of raining destruction down on the other country should it all come to that. So in some ways this was a struggle to clean technological superiority

over a rival. The Soviets really got the jump on the Americans with the launch of Sputnik in nineteen fifty seven, marking the first time a human made satellite entered Earth orbit, and they would also be the first to put a person into space. The first spacesuit emerged from the then Soviet Union as part of its cosmonaut program. It had

the designation of SK one. The SK stood for some Russian words that translate roughly into space diving suit because the suit had some features similar to like a deep sea diving suit, think of like the big daddies in BioShock, and even this was an evolution of earlier flight suits

worn by Soviet jet fighter pilots. The first human to go into space was Yuri Gagarin in nineteen sixty one, and Gageron's trip was aboard a space capsule and he wasn't going to exit the capsule while in space, so he didn't need to have the full extra vehicular activity style spacesuit. However, because the Soviets had not yet developed a spacecraft that could land safely, he would have to eject during descent and then parachute down from an altitude

of around twenty thousand feet. So these are the sort of factors that went into the design of the suit. They had to make a suit that would be able to do these kind of things. The suit had a helmet that had a visor that could be lowered down over the face. In fact, it had a pressure sensor. If the pressure sensor detected a decrease in pressure a rapid decompression, then the visor could slam down and seal it.

The helmet was permanently attached to the suit. You could only the helmet off by taking off the whole darn suit. Worn Under the helmet was a leather covered radio headset below the helmet on the suit was a collar that could inflate in the event that Gageron landed in the water.

That would allow him to keep his head above water if that were the case, because again, since the helmet couldn't be removed, there was no getting out of that suit quickly in the case of water landing, but an inflated collar could keep his head above the level of water. The fabric of the suit was nylon, which is a synthetic polymer, and it was bright orange in color to make it easier to spot Gagern upon his return. The suit also had gloves with leather palms and heavy leather boots,

and the suit did the job. Gageran returned safely to Earth after spending more than an hour and a half orbiting the planet. One time, he reportedly startled a farmer and his daughter as he returned. When he landed, his walking through the countryside, dragging a parachute behind him, dressed in a big orange suit and having a big helmet on, and he tried his best to assure them that he was a Soviet just like they were, and all he needed was a telephone in order to call Moscow, which

I just think is a great story. Meanwhile, over the United States, there was the same rush to get to space, and at that point it was a rush to catch up to the Soviets because they had beaten America to the punch. Engineers were already working on suit designs that would be suitable to allow astronauts to go outside of a spacecraft, perhaps even walking on the Moon. But these were in the earliest stages of development. They were in

the prototype stage. And I saw pictures of one of the early pressurized suits and it literally looked like it came out of a Ed Wood science fiction film. If you don't know who that is, Plan nine from Outer Space director, just the cheesiest of nineteen fifty style sci fi B movies. And the engineer inside the suit was wearing it looked like kind of a metal barrel for the torso, like think of like one of those ten

wind up robot toys. It kind of looked like that had segmented sleeves that covered the arms, had a helmet with a glass visor that looked kind of like the head of a Lego figurine kind of had that cylindrical look to it. They were a long way away from the modern space suit, is what I'm saying. The Mercury seven, the pilots suit trained to be part of Project Mercury, which was our first attempt to send people to space, relied upon a flight suit called the Navy Mark four,

which was designed by the BF good Rich Company. The heritage for the Mark four had traced its history all the way back to Wiley Post, whom I mentioned before the break, and in fact they even had the same designer, a guy named Russell Colly worked on both of those. The suit had a zipper that extended from the left shoulder and moved diagonally down across the torso and ended at the waist. There are also a couple of other zippers.

There were two at the neck and one around the waist, which made it quote unquote easier to get in and out of the suit. But when I say easier, just know that I don't mean easy, just easier than some other one piece suits. The suit covered the entire body except for the head and hands, which were covered by a detachable helmet and gloves, respectively. So the boots were built into it, but the gloves were not. The helmet containing the microphones and speakers were there to serve as

a communication system for the astronauts. The visor was made out of plexiglass. The visor could also be raised out of the way or lowered into place and then sealed with the pneumatic seal, so again it could provide a pressurized environment for the astronauts if necessary. The gloves attached to the suit through a tent ball bearing lock. I do not know what that means. I mean, I know it's a lock, but I haven't looked into how it

actually worked. But anyway, the purpose for it was to give the astronauts a little bit more wrisk mobility when come without you know, compromising the fact that you need to have a seal there with the rest of the suit, otherwise you would have a leak. Right. The index and middle fingers on both gloves had little red lights incorporated into them, and these were fed by batteries that were located in a battery pack on the back side of

the gloves. The torso section had two major layers. The inner layer was made of neoprene and nylon, and the outer layer had an illuminized nylon fabric designed to reflect heat away from the astronaut. You know, inside the suit, a neck ring secured the helmet in place, with an additional tied down strap to keep the helmet in place so that should the suit be pressurized, the helmet wouldn't

rise up and block the astronaut's vision. Yeah, that's going to become important because I'm going to talk about a case where something like that happened to a Russian cosmonaut and how it could have been disastrous. So this suit used a pressurization system to keep pressure inside the suit close to Earth levels. It also used cords on the suit to restrict the suit's tendency to expand like a balloon,

which would severely limit maneuverability. The Mercury spacecraft itself was pressurized, so the suits didn't have to be pressurized for normal operation, and that made things a little bit easier for the astronauts who were piloting the spacecraft because they didn't They had a little more mobility, although they couldn't do much with that mobility because they were in a tiny, tiny spacecraft.

It was only large enough for one person, and even then it was cramped The suits also incorporated aluminium in the materials. Like I mentioned, that provided extra strength compared to earlier flight suits. But again, these suits were meant to be worn inside the capsule only these were not suits that could be worn out in space on their own. They also didn't have good temperature control. Basically, the oxygen

system they had served as the cooling system. So basically the way the oxygen system worked was that it had a tube would attach to the suit at the waist and oxygen would come in through that tube at the wasst Oxygen would then circulate a bit through tubes running inside the suit to help cool down the astronaut, and then it would eventually make its way up to the helmet, and then excess would exit out the right side of

the helmet into a different tube including carbon dioxide. There was also some biosensors and a connector in the suit to allow the suit to connect to the spacecraft's instruments that would allow NASA to monitor astronaut vital signs and stuff. On the left arm of the suit was a pressure indicator, so that should the suit be pressurized, the astronaut would be able to see what the pressure level was in

the suit pretty easily. And underneath all of this, the astronauts wore a one piece lightweight cotton body suit, so lots of layers here. Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space one month after Gagarin's achievement. Shepherd's flight was sub orbital, however, he did not go into orbit. John Glenn would be the first American to orbit the Earth in nineteen sixty two, and he completed three orbits before returning back to Earth. Both Shepherd and Glenn wore

versions of the Mercury spacesuit. But let's hop back over to the Soviet Union to talk about suits designed to keep humans safe out in space itself without the benefits of a having a spacecraft around you. So the Soviets were the first to have a person take a trip outside a spacecraft on a spacewalk, which happened in March of nineteen sixty five. That person was Alexei Leonov. He

would have to enter an airlock and inflatable airlock. He would then have that and he'd be in the airlock while his co cosmonaut would release pressure so that there could be an equalization of the lack of pressure out in space and the air pressure that's inside the capsule, and they could transfer outside of the Vokschad to spacecraft and then spend a few minutes outside doing a spacewalk, and he remained connected to the capsule by a tether,

so he wouldn't float off aimlessly into space, and the Soviets would learn some pretty valuable lessons. Nearly at the expense of Leonov's life. His spacesuit had been called the

Burcut spacesuit. Burcut was actually the name the spacecraft was a Vakshod two, but it had the name of Burcut, which means golden eagle, and his suit had a hermetic casing layer on top of the pressurized space suit and came complete with a shoulder pack in which the suits two oxygen cylinders were mounted, so he was carrying his oxygen to supply on his suit. This would be different from the way the Americans would do it with Project

Gemini or Jiminy, if you prefer. It was really hard to find any solid details about this suit, but there are a few things I can say for sure. One is that the spacesuit was really bulky even before going into space, but once in space the suit became even bulkier, so again, imagine being inside an inflated balloon, and he started to get the picture. There was a lack of pressure outside the suit, so the suit expanded in every direction.

That meant that Leonov found that his hands were no longer securely in his gloves, like his fingers were no longer in the fingertips of his gloves because the arms of the spacesuit expanded beyond the length of his arms. The same thing was happening with his feet, like his feet were no longer firmly in the boot section of his suit, and he was having issues seeing through the

helmet as well. That also meant that he would no longer be able to go back into the spacecraft the way they had trained, which was to go in through the airlock feet first, So instead he had to figure out a way to pull himself inside headfirst, and he said it took a really long time, and he had a limited amount of oxygen, about forty five minutes worth total.

He also started overheating. He found that the strain of moving around inside the suit out in space was pretty intense, and it was causing him to get really hot inside the suit. The material of the suit was pretty stiff, and due to the inflation issue, it meant that fighting against the suit was necessary in order to get anything done. He had to not just put forth effort to do the thing, but to do the thing against the suit. Even though he was only outside for a little bit,

he was still getting pretty exhausted. So in order to make his way back back into the airlock, Leonov chose to vent some of his oxygen out into space because he needed to be able to regain some flexibility inside a suit, and it's just fully inflated. He just didn't have it. It makes me think of that bit in a Christmas story where the kid can't put his arms

down because he's wrapped up in too many coats. So this could have been disastrous, as if he had vented too much oxygen out, he could have been starved of oxygen, or he could have had a full depressurization of his suit, or he could have just suffered the effects of depressurization, kind of like the bends if you come up from

a deep sea dive too quickly. But he was able to make it inside the airlock, then he had to crunch up into essentially a fetal position so that he could turn around, close the airlock and give the signal to his commander to pressurize the airlock so that he could come back inside the capsule. So this was just one of several technical issues that plagued the mission. We'll talk about another one in a little bit, but overall the was a success and the cosmonauts returned to Earth safely.

Both the Soviets and Americans included survival kits in their spacecraft for returning cosmonauts and returning astronauts to use because in the early days, those space capsules were designed to either splash down in the ocean, which was the American style, or to have, you know, kind of a semi soft landing on land, which was the preferred method of the Soviets. But while both had some survival and first aid gear inside these kits, the Soviets approach was slightly more intense

because the Soviet kit included a gun. Now the earlier kits included a nine millimeters pistol, meant to serve as some protection should the cosmonauts land in a remote region in Russia and then need to fight off local wildlife, which was a very real possibility. On the very mission in which Leonov went on his spacewalk, the returning capsule malfunctioned on descent and the cosmonauts had to rest control

from the landing process. They had to get manual control, which was in itself an ordeal, and it meant that ultimately they landed really far away from their target landing space, and actually one hundred miles away from the closest city, and they landed in a mountainous, snowy region, and Leonov realized that his little nine millimeter pistol, while some comfort, would be of little use of He and his fellow cosmonaut Belyayev encountered wolves or a bear out in the wilderness,

which was a possibility, and so Leonov would later commission the creation of a new weapon called the TP eighty two pistol, which was part sawed off shotgun, part rifle. So it it literally had three barrels, It had two side by side shotgun barrels, and it had a rifle barrel mounted below the shotgun barrels, and it was in a pistol form factor, but I mean that pistol would pack a heck of a kick, and it also had a detachable stock that could convert into a machete, so,

you know, typical space stuff. The so used capsules used by the Russian Space Agency carried a TP eighty two aboard as recently as two thousand and seven, before the Russians discontinued that practice, although they did use a different weapon in its place. Some Russian crews choose not to have a gun aboard at all, fearing that the presence of a firearm can kind of make things tense out

in space. But yeah, interesting little side note there. Now, when we come back, we'll continue down the path of space suit evolution, but first let's take another quick break. So Leonov took the first space walk in nineteen sixty five, and in the process the Russians learned a lot about the limitations of their spacesuits. In general, the American approach put more emphasis on comfort and usability than the Russians did. But the same time, the Russians managed to get to

those things first and the Americans didn't. So back to America. Starting in nineteen sixty two, so before we had Leonov's spacewalk, there was the launch of Project Gemini or Jeminy, depending upon your preferred pronunciation. I preferred Gemini, but yeah, Jiminy is pretty common when you listen to interviews of the time. This was the first two astronaut capsule that the Americans used, and there were a couple of different space suits that were used in this project, one of which was designed

for extra vehicular activities or spacewalks. That one was called the G four C. But first let's start with the G one C. So NASA had to choose which spacesuit designed to go with for their Gemini project, and since one of the goals for that project was to have and astronaut perform a spacewalk, this was a complex issue. Astronaut Gus Grissom tested out a suit designed by the David Clark Company, later designated as the G one SEA,

and it had two layers. It had an internal layer made out of rubber and neoprene, and it had a pressure bladder inside it for the G suit protection, and then the outer layer was illuminized, similar to the kind of material that the Project Mercury spacesuits used. The outer layer was meant to resist the ballooning effect as well. There was this suit, by the way, actually went to auction. Sothabe's had an auction on it and it went for

nearly forty four thousand dollars. The Dave Clark Company then made a follow up suit called the G two C. This would actually serve as the prototype for the Gemini

spacesuit designs. None of them were flown. These were not spacesuits that actually went to space, so they were more like a proof of concept, and the company had to make additional changes to address some issues and concerns with a suit, like for example, there was a visor guard on the helmet that made the helmet a bit bulkier, and that in turn would make it harder for astronauts to move through a spacecraft hatch, so that was one

of the things they had to address. The first suit to actually see use in Project Gemini was the G three C, and the G three C had six layers. The innermost layer was the rubberized nylon bladder to help provide pressure on extremities and prevent blackouts. All the other layers were of materials called nylon and nomes, and the suit's boots could actually be removed. These were not part

of the suit themselves. They could lock into place. The helmet contained communications equipment, so it really was an evolution of earlier suits. The G four C, the next one, added a couple of extra layers on top of the ones you found on the G three C, and these layers were milar insulation, meant to help deal with those extreme temperatures that you could encounter when you're out in space. The pilot's version of the suit, because the pilot was the person who would do the spacewalks, had a sun

visor as well. You could attached the sun visor to the helmet. This would help protect the astronaut from the bright rays of the sun because obviously there's no atmosphere, so there's nothing there to diffuse that light. To supply oxygen to the astronaut inside the suit, the suit actually had a hose that connected back to the spacecraft, so it didn't have its own on board oxygen. It had to connect to the spacecraft when you were out doing

an EVA. The suit also relied upon air conditioning to help manage temperatures, but the astronauts soon found that this just wasn't cutting it. The air conditioning wasn't good enough to help keep their body temperature low as extra vehicular activities often caused a sharp increase in body temperature, and not only would it was it uncomfortable, but then you know, the astronaut would start sweating pretty badly and soon the inside of their helmet would fog up, so it could

become a real risk. There were a couple of other space suits in the Gemini line, with the G four c AMU that stands for Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. There was also the G five C which was designed to be

more easily removed. So NASA and the astronauts on the Gemini flights experimented with the astronauts removing their spacesuits in middle of a mission to see if they could operate better within the confines of the capsule without those giant suits on, and surprise, surprise, they found out that there was a lot easier to do that, and so they kind of made this determination that when you're not in part of a critical phase of a mission, like if you're not in the launch or return or you know,

things like that or docking, if it's just the normal operations, then they could operate outside of these suits, which you know, was a nice, nice decision. I guess the Russians similarly flew several missions without having their cosmonauts wearing spacesuits inside their spacecraft, but in nineteen seventy one, an accident happened and a returning Soya's capsule d compressed, and all three cosmonauts aboard the Soyu's capsule died because none of them

were wearing spacesuits. The Soya's capsule itself wasn't even really accommodating spacesuits. It wasn't designed to accommodate people, because obviously when you're wearing a space suit, you're taking up a lot more well space. But this prompted the Soviet Union to develop a new emergency recovery spacesuit called the Sokol Sokol and that has been in use since nineteen seventy

three on Russian space flights. The Gemini spacesuit was meant to serve as a transition to Apollo missions, as well as the A one CA spacesuit based off the G four C. Gemini suit was intended for the first block of Apollo missions, but tragically, what would later be designated Apollo one ended in catastrophe when during a launch test, a fire broke out in the crew cabin and killed

all three members of that mission. The rest of that phase of the Apollo mission, which was collectively referred to as Black, was canceled, so the A one C never saw any use out in space. The second block of Apollo missions would need suits designed for extra vehicular activity, and this would end up being a really big move in NASA's history and a really big move in the history of space suits. That is where we're going to

pick up with the next episode in this series. We'll pick up with the creation of the Apollo space suits. We'll talk about the issues of what happens when you go from flying very short space missions to very long space missions aboard spacecraft that do not yet have a toilet, because that was a thing. In other words, the next episode is going to be growedy, y'all. It's going to be gross to the max, so I hope you join

me for that one. But we'll also talk about how the space suit evolved further, what it was like during these Space Shuttle era and why NASA was looking to update it because really spacesuits had not received a massive update since the Space Shuttle era. But that'll all come in our next episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me and let me know what those are. The best way to do that is over on Twitter.

The handle for the show is tech Stuffs HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.