hey guys adam savage here at the smithsonian air and space museum we are here filming some stuff
for tested and some other stuff but we had a few minutes to kill and i wandered over into this zone
of course because there's a couple of amazing spaces to talk about uh first up we have david
scott's apollo 15 suit uh i think i started off wrong here's the way i want to talk about this
there is so much really interesting engineering between these two suits and
what's going on with spacesuit research today so this is david scott's apollo 15 lunar suit
uh our old tested friend the late al warden actually was the pilot on apollo 15.
david wore this on the moon and this is the a7lb version of ilc's dover's moon suit this was at the
time the very latest in spacesuit engineering and still the astronaut after donning the suit
and the boots and the gloves and the helmet had a backpack to put on that connected up
with connectors over here a lot of equipment had to get bolted together for the astronaut to be
safe now here is the russian crochet moon suit this is from the 60s and obviously it
looks very different but also structurally from an engineering standpoint it is very different
inside unlike the moon suit it has a hard shell inside nasa wouldn't go to hard upper torsos
until the space shuttle days when they began to build the emu's with what they called huts
hard upper torsos but the most for me my favorite part about this one you see how the backpack opens
up like a door that is how you get into this suit is one point of entry that's it that is
brilliant simplicity and we wouldn't take on that idea at nasa until only about a couple a decade or
so ago and our new artemis suits the xemus that they are currently working on to get to the moon
those are built this way with a rear entry integrated backpack um now nasa's backpack
has this beautiful uh sort of toothed belt design for closing it really really securely
but i also really love looking at this one and seeing the russians like really simple two fins
that go into two large o-rings basically like a refrigerator door and the astronaut is
sealed inside now for a lovely bit of symmetry uh the russian name for this suit translates to
golden falcon uh and the apollo 15 crew flew to the moon on a ship named the falcon the other
thing about this hard parts inside the suit versus a soft suit uh that idea of a hard versus a soft
anthropomorphic spacesuit describes a tension inside every space program about how to design
something that is rigid and controllable for someone yet easy for them to move around
how do you add hard parts when every human being is a completely different size i mean we've done
millions and millions of dollars of research the military nasa only to find out that there is no
such thing as an average human being and so it is really really difficult to make hard parts fit
soft bodies and these are two iterations along that long timeline and it is a problem that is
still being solved given that i've spent the last month of my life obsessively replicating
a couple of xemus i am most fascinated by the stand here i really like the russians design
of a rolling stand for getting into this suit it's elegant it's lightweight you can see the
whole suit gives you access 360 around the whole thing and yet holds it really nicely
i may eventually make myself one of these i can't get enough of thinking about
researching replicating and talking about the anthropomorphic spaceships that humans have built
to survive the rigors of space and getting to see them up close is always a treat