You Can’t Put a Price On Hurtling Through The Void

Or can you? Smithsonian magazine has a little background on the spacesuits that were manufactured for the very first moon landing:

No one knows what Columbus was wearing when he set foot in the New World, but on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong took his “one giant leap” onto the Moon, he was clad in this custom-made spacesuit, model A7L, serial number 056. Its cost, estimated at the time as $100,000 (more than $670,000 today), sounds high only if you think of it as couture. In reality, once helmet, gloves and an oxygen-supplying backpack were added, it was a wearable spacecraft.

The best part of all of this might be that the company that created the spacesuit, the International Latex Corporation in Dover, Delaware, traditionally manufactured bras and girdles for Playtex. The ILC’s experience with flexible, rubber clothing helped them make the kind of spacesuits Neil and Buzz could bounce around moon craters and run around picking up space dust without worrying about dying of oxygen deprivation. Hot!

Photo: cliff1066™

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