I am in my fantasy of all fantasy places. I'm in the middle of the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and I'm wearing my spacesuit. Now, I'm not just
doing this because it's super fun, even though it is. I'm doing it because the
museum is the brand-new home of the Ur spacesuit, the OG spacesuit, the one
that is the reason I got into space and it's what I think of when I think of
astronauts and it's why I own and keep modifying and improving this beautiful
Ryan Nagata suit. Yes, Neil Armstrong's original Apollo 11 suit was
revealed yesterday after years of restoration and it has a new home here
in the Smithsonian and I'm about to go see it and I wasn't gonna do that
without dressing up.
Look at that. It's so beautiful. Oh my god.
It's so moving. Now, I'm gonna get out of this outfit because I'm in Washington DC
in the middle of the summer and I'm about to have heat stroke. But once I
get out I'm gonna get to talk to Lisa Young who spent several years restoring
this suit.
Lisa! What an unbelievable achievement! Yes, it's been a long time. We've been
working on this suit for like decades. Here it is finally. It's so
beautiful, the pose ... It must have been intoxicating to work on this. Yes.
We weren't sure how to pose it. I mean, I'm glad you mentioned that first
because we wanted to give a little bit more life into it. Because
costumes in museums are very static. And especially military
costumes. They're always on some straight board mannequin.
And we really tossed that up for a long time about how we could give it a little
bit of life and make it feel like he's back in his suit. Like, recreate that
moment of Neil Armstrong wearing his spacesuit. Well, it feels like there's a
person in there. What needed to be restored. Can you start me as to like
what was deteriorating and what was happening in the beginning? So we use the
word conservation, not restoration. But it's just because we're not
trying to make it look new. We're not recreating 1969. What's happened to the
suit has happened to the suit. It's naturally aged over time. The first thing
you'll notice is the lunar dust on the knees. Well, I hope everybody notices that first.
It is so sharp and angular that it just gets inside the fiber. And we're talking
about regolith, right? Little tiny pieces of glass and silicon that are not eroded
so they have tiny edges. Exactly. They grip on and just stick there. And
they tear apart the fabric as it moves? Right. So movement
is really hard with the spacesuits because they're awkward so
for a long time people didn't know how to even move them in our own museum.
We'd pick them up underneath the leg or something and now we are much
more careful about handling them. We know we can disturb those layers. The
other conservation challenge is the pressure bladder inside, the rubber. It's
a natural synthetic blend, which does not play well together
or age well. It was only meant to last six
months. So knowing that it's really hard. It has done it's sort of thing in
the deterioration sense where it's hardened, it's a little bit brittle, but
it does continue to off-gas these really unwanted vapors that are getting into
the suit materials. So given that that's one of 21 layers, how do you
deal with such a thing? So we did imagery to look inside. We did CAT scanning and
x-radiography things and looked at the deformation of the rubber pieces,
what parts looked like they were frozen versus still flexible and all of that is
incorporated into our mannequin structure which had to be exactly right
to hold the the interior components sort of where they were, like push on them out
but not push too hard, not let them collapse in. Oh my god, what an
engineering challenge. That never even occurred to me.So the mannequin
is built to accommodate both the still flexible and maybe unflexible parts of
the interior layers to all to keep it from continuing to age. Right. Is that
correct? Yes. So the hard part about that is as you know from putting on your own
spacesuit we had to build a mannequin inside. So you have to open up the
back and it's kind of like doing surgery. You're putting the leg in,
you're putting the arm in. And so our mannequin uses a new lightweight
aluminum structure. We started with Neil Armstrong's measurements.
Knowing that the suit had shrunk a little bit but we started there. We
entered them into a CAD program on the computer and we sort of built the
mannequin from that. We used a central section of a skeleton with fittings that
we 3d printed so we can actually adjust the arm's rotation, the leg, the hip where
we want it. And then lock them into place without any tools inside because we
needed something that would rotate and catch and we have pictures of
all these little pieces we can show you. And then after that we still did our
original build where we use inert polyethylene foam where we build out
the arms and the legs to fit those ... To give them body. Exactly. And cover those
with an archival textile that we found. So all of that included, the harder
part was that we wanted to ventilate through the suit for the first time.
We wanted to move air through to get these gasses out. So this structure in
the middle, this mount that you see which is attached to the base of our case ...
Those two black lines? Hooks up to fittings under there. We have ventilation
air coming up through that that hooks into the skeleton and then we made
little holes throughout our entire mannequin system and used only materials
that could breathe. And so we have air sort of pushing out
into the suit and into the cavities to increase that ventilation piece.
Has anything like that been done before? Never. Never in museums
that we know of. So this is our new system. It's an air
exchange about every three days. It's not as much as the actual case. But once the case
air empties, we have a scrubber inside our mechanical closet that catches all
these gases and cleans air and puts it back into the case. The gloves and helmet
we also stopped displaying on spacesuits a long time ago because we know that
they set up that micro seal still and so we were continuing to trap the gases. So
we've invented another 3d part that we connected everything with to the
mannequin so it looks like they're attached but they're not attached using
their original fitting. But there's an air gap so that air can move. Oh! Wow.
So you spent years with this at your desk. There must have been
countless moments really, "I can't believe I'm working on this." Yeah, I get emotional
at times. Especially when people come into the lab that haven't
seen it. I mean, I did get used to seeing a lot and then I put it away and
bring it back out and I was really super excited for the public's initial
reaction to this and and hearing their feedback on all of our work. It's
been stunning. It's been two hour lines for the last couple of days.
It's very humbling working on this project. It's such
an important piece of history. Anything you try you had to try on
other pieces of Apollo spacesuits that we acquired through research purposes
and things. You don't want to do it for the first time on this one.
What kind of things did you learn on this that you didn't expect? Some of
the interesting things are these tiny little ... you can see them on the
gloves, on the gauntlet ... those little gray spots. Those are actually
repairs that ILC did to the glove pre-flight.
Because lunar dust is now trapped under the coating that they put on which is a
Teflon coating which mirrored with the actual fabric. But they had gotten
these abrasions in the before they left and they decided not to
resew everything. It wasn't impacting the suit at all or the function. You were
telling me about the flag on the shoulder. The flag has these little spots
along the red and we had assumed maybe there was a little bit too much
rubbing of the shoulders in the command module. You get a little abrasion on
the material. But after seeing the original footage they've just put out on
Apollo, all the flags look like this from the real mission so we think there was a
printing problem with the actual silk-screening.
So sometimes you find things you don't need to conserve. Those are the things
we would not go in and in-paint or fill in. I mean, it tells a story. It
wasn't damaged during the mission but you just don't know. Right. So my
reluctance is to do the least amount possible to the spacesuit because 20
years from now people coming behind me or or not ... I don't want people
changing what you see in that and all these little stories about it. Now, you
talked about trying to research things and finding that the manuals and the
notes from the engineers often didn't necessarily match reality so did you
keep a detailed set of notes during this process? We do.
I have maps of like all the stitching. I have the maps of UV photography we did.
We did all sorts of different lighting photography across the surfaces so you
can see all the different coatings and the stitches and the materials.
As you probably know the stitching was really incredible because
they had to use beta cloth threads because you couldn't use threads that
were going to be at a melting point lower than the actual material inside.
One of the ladies who worked on the suit told me about this great story where
they use the black lights and the engineers would come through and the
managers to check their that they didn't cheat and use these other threads so I
took the black light to the suit and I could see all this stuff popping out.
From repairs? Right. So it was really incredible. We have those images, we have
the x-rays now fully. It took us 60 plates to do the suit and then we
stitched them together in another program and so we have the complete
x-ray. What I love about the x-rays is they
make it clear how much engineering you can't see. Right. And all the
restraints and cables and fittings and everything that's sandwiched in that
whole outer system. Lisa, it is an incredible achievement and my hat is off
to you and I really thank you for talking to me about what you did.