The Bra-and-Girdle Maker That Fashioned the Impossible for NASA

The Bra-and-Girdle Maker That Fashioned the Impossible for NASA

In 1966, when seamstresses at the International Latex Corporation arrived at its new Apollo Suit shopfloor in Frederica, Delaware, they were essentially “taught to sew again from scratch.” And for good reason: Compared to the company’s bras and girdles, the craftsmanship needed to fashion a spacesuit was, in every sense, out of this world.

The journey to this point had been improbable for a company whose grand name had initially belonged to a single founder and salesman, Abram Spanel, selling mail-order girdles through magazine ads. It was only thanks to one of Spanel’s first employees — his own TV repairman, MIT dropout Leonard (Lenny) Shepard — that ILC maintained a small “industrial” division researching government contracts. Shepard was optimistic that the firm’s expertise in rubber, nylon, and strapping could provide an answer to work in space.

In 1963, when NASA’s Apollo mission was still in its infancy, the agency invited several private companies — including Hamilton Standard, David Clark Company, and ILC — to design a suit capable of sustaining astronauts on the moon. It was a major federal contract, and the bra-and-girdle maker was a dark horse. Compared with its competitors, ILC had far less aerospace experience and was best known for manufacturing undergarments.

But as it turned out, no company was better suited to tackle the physical demands of making a suit that was both comfortable and reliable.

Key to these demands were NASA’s painstaking engineering standards, which pushed the very limits of the equipment and seamstresses’ own techniques. The tolerances allowed — less than a 64th of an inch in only one direction from the seam — meant that yard after yard of fabric was sewn to an accuracy smaller than the sewing needle’s eye. To achieve such precision, many women used a modified treadle that, instead of starting and stopping a Singer sewing machine’s operation, fired one stitch per footfall through the multiple layers of a suit’s surface. For the hundreds of feet of seams in each suit, this meant venturing stitch by tiny stitch across the length of a football field, with a single misstep leading to a discarded suit.

At the same time that ILC’s seamstresses were being asked to meet unprecedented precision standards, they were denied traditional tools, such as fastening pins used to maintain sewing accuracy. To a garment whose reliability depended on an impermeable rubber bladder, mechanical aids like pins were an inherently risky proposition. (The company learned that lesson in 1967, after a single pin was discovered between the layers of a suit prototype, leading to the installation of an X-ray machine on the shop floor that would regularly scan the suits for errant fasteners.)

The most valued seamstresses were those like Roberta Pilkenton, who could sew together the outermost layer of the Apollo suit, the Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment (TMG). Pilkenton crafted the TMG’s 17 concentric layers, with hundreds of yards of seams, without a single tool except her own guiding fingers. Those who persisted with pins as an aid to assembly were required to check out a numbered set from a supervisor at the beginning and end of their shift, and the sets were accounted for daily. Those flouting regulations and bringing extra pins from home could, notoriously, find one of them pricked into their backside by an irate supervisor.

If the precision involved in sewing concentric suit layers seems fastidious, then the task facing the “gluers” — who assembled each layer of the suit’s concentric surfaces together before final sewing — was even more finicky. Layering flexible latex with whisper-thin layers of Mylar (which kept astronauts cool), Dacron (which held suit layers together), and Kapton (which protected against extreme temperatures), they used paintbrushes and a specially formulated glue to assemble diaphanous sheets into man-shaped forms. The assembly tolerance was no more than the thickness of a single Mylar layer. Each of the 16 glue-assembled layers needed not just to fit the astronaut’s body shape, but, like dolls in a Russian matryoshka, to be infinitesimally larger than the layer it contained.

Any visitor to ILC’s Dover plant — or the new facility into which operations expanded in 1966 — could observe the care and craftsmanship of those who glued and sewed the Apollo suit’s layers together. What they could not freely observe, however, was the most closely guarded craft of ILC’s suit assembly process: the “dipping” of layers of rubber to form the ribbed sections, or “convolutes.” It was these assemblies that gave ILC’s suit its essential mobility. The “dippers” who accomplished this task were, like their colleagues behind Singer machines, using skills found elsewhere in the Playtex organization. Until 1966, pipes carrying liquid latex ran from the same tanks that supplied the girdle and bra assembly lines to the dipping room.

The elaborate process of assembling a convolute had been the key to ILC’s suit designs since the early 1960s, and its equally delicate manufacture was the company’s most closely guarded industrial secret. Even so, it was more a craft than a science, and only three or four employees had the right “touch” to consistently produce usable components.

In retrospect, however, ILC’s unique skill seems to have gone beyond these individual crafts and into the delicate art of their collective synthesis. Crucial to this larger success seems to have been the professional respect accorded to, and the practical collaboration engaged in with, ILC’s craftswomen. Indeed, some of ILC’s most effective engineers, such as Robert Wise, took weeks of sewing lessons from the seamstresses to better understand how fingers, fabric, and thread interacted in the suits’ complex assemblies. In practice, the craftswomen were allowed, and even encouraged, to suggest improvements in procedures and assemblies as they were continually developed.

Emblematic of this culture were the late-night collaborations between seamstress Eleanor Foraker (pulled from Playtex’s diaper-cover assembly line in 1964) and Lenny Shepard, by that point the project head of Apollo suit development at ILC. Striving to meet deadline after deadline, Foraker would often be sewing late into the night at the plant. In the final stages of a suit’s manufacture, the multilayered, man-shaped assembly could not be folded or squashed under a normal sewing machine, and instead had to be sewed on one of two Singer machines — dubbed “Big Moe” and “Sweet Sue” — modified to have an elongated arm and massive sewing bed so an entire suit could be moved under its needle. For each of these early deadlines, Shepard himself would stay up with Foraker, helping to slide and rotate the suit during the final stages of assembly, and quizzing the seamstress on her technique and expertise.

While ILC managed to integrate technology and technique within its corporate body, it proved incapable of fully adapting to Apollo’s organizational culture. The most prominent failures centered on systems management procedures.

Particularly vexing to NASA was ILC’s avoidance of paperwork — not just in the everyday transport of spacesuits, but in their manufacture. From the first days of its spacesuit prototypes, ILC had eschewed traditional engineering media — measured drawings, charts, and memoranda — in favor of those derived from its soft-goods heritage: patterns and instructions. ILC’s attitude came through in a seamstress’s comment to a NASA technical team in 1968: “It might look all right on that piece of paper, but I’m not going to sew that piece of paper.”

A much larger drama unfolded over the complex issue of “configuration management,” a system developed in the Atlas (ICMB) Missile program to precisely track the origin and details of each part of a complex technological artifact. The procedures were an enormous challenge for ILC.