#astronauti

Samantha Harvey, Orbital, traduzione di Gioia Guerzoni, NN Editore (collana La Stagione), 2025¹, p. 8.

Spacesuit Fashioning Apollo

Nicholas de Monchaux

The Mit Press, Cambridge, Ma. 2011, 364 pages, 18,5x23,5cm, ISBN 978-0-252-01520-2

euro 70,00

email if you want to buy [email protected]

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This book is the story of that spacesuit. It is a story of the triumph over the military-industrial complex by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand of "Playtex"—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

Playtex's spacesuit went up against hard armor-like spacesuits designed by military contractors and favored by NASA's engineers. It was only when those attempts failed—when traditional engineering firms could not integrate the body into mission requirements—that Playtex, with its intimate expertise, got the job.

In Spacesuit, Nicholas de Monchaux tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. He touches, among other things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior's New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA's Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. The twenty-one-layer spacesuit, de Monchaux argues, offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

Siamo nell'era degli schieramenti e dunque si creano fazioni di rincoglioniti che combattono per le loro ragioni.

Un giorno, come sempre su questo pianeta, quelli della massa vedranno che i pochi avevano forse intuito e capito molto più di loro, ma sarà troppo tardi.

Verrà costituito il giorno della memoria per la dipartita dei viaggi nello spazio e a nessuno sarà chiesto scusa o fregherà qualcosa di come si fa la pipì nello spazio.

“Mission to Mars” (2000) di Brian De Palma

E naturale che scienza e fantascienza vadano spesso di pari passo. A me personalmente piace e affascina quando quest’ultima prova a giustificare la realtà facendosi ispirare da essa. Nel 1976 una sonda spaziale fotografò la superficie di Marte e quello che ne risultò era una visione dall’alto di varie montagne, una delle quali sembrava un volto umanoide ben delineato. Il caso divenne popolare è…