Watch the National Book festival starting at 10 00 a. M. Eastern. Our coverage includes interswruz rouge Bader Ginsburg in her book my own words, david treuer, Sharon Robinson talks about her book, chifld the dream. Rick atkinson and thomas machll. It is saturday at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on book tv on cspan2. Up next, a discussion about the apollo spacesuits 50 years after the first u. S. Moon landing. Panelist is including designers. The space museum was the host of this event here in washington, d. C. Weve assembled a panel of speakers, a really fantastic. Some of my favorite people i like to talk to when talking about spacesuits, to recount the making of the apollo spacesuits and to inform us on the lessons that we have learned as we are going back to the next spacesuit in the next thing in spacesuit development, be it going back to the moon, going to an asteroid or going on to mars. In order to save time for tonights program, im going to introduce all four speakers and theyre going to come up and tell their stories and then well have time for discussion and questions from the audience at the end. Our speakers tonight in order of appearance are first bill airy, who is a recently retired test engineer at ilc dover, the company that made the apollo spacesuits and the suits that astronauts use to space walk from the iss when they leave via the american port on the International Space station. The next speaker for tonight will be ryan nagata, an artist and maker from california who did a sort of unique approach to becoming a maker and model maker. He started out as a film director and discovered that he his real passion was making models, props, and costumes for hire. Theyre featured in many movies. Ryan will talk about his experience of recreating some of the vintage suits that were used in the movie first man, the biopic about Neil Armstrong. And then the third speaker was a russian lead spacesuit designer at the company in the ussr in russia. And he is has come to this country and participated in spacesuit glove designs and won the competition of the spacesuit glove design. He now has a company of his own based in brooklyn and he is going to talk about his perspective on spacesuits and n. Light of his career as a russian spacesuit designer and engineer and an american spacesuit entrepreneur. Our last speaker for the evening will be dr. David newman who is the apollo professor of astronautics and everything nearing at the Massachusetts Institute of technology. And shes the one of the few people i can say has a better job title than i do. Really amazing. Dr. Newman will talk about the next generation of responsive materials for spacesuits to make these form fitting spacecraft truly a perfect fit for exploration. Im going to interduroduce our t speaker. Hes going to talk about the apollo spacesuits. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, kathy. Its an honor to be invited by this panel. Its quite a panel. I thank you all for coming tonight. So lets start with the slide presentation. I have, like, you know, five minutes to cover 40, 50 years of history of apollo. Ill make this pretty fast. I try to do it as best i can. I start from the humble beginnings. This is very early ilc spacesuit developed by len shepard developing suits at the time. He saw a need to support the vision of humans working in outer space. Len shepard was an ils engineer working on the helmets. You see the helmet in the photo. They were use fod for high altie suits. He realized the future of humans in space is not far off. But he could see that the tl is only b. F. Goodrich with the flight suits. But there is now true spacesuits out there. This is early. Were talking 1950s. We knew that humans were going fly into space. So he proposed the company that they provide plumbing for developing such a suit. This funding is split ultimately about 250 50 through the 1950s and early 1960s. By 1957, i just want to say that he was hired and a few others to help carry that torch to next level. I mentioned george. He was quite an inventor who helped carry the suit noechlt levto the next level. The next slide here, this is our first entry into the apollo contract. So through the 50s and early 60s, it wins the contest for this suit. Many of them didnt really have a suit. They had a design. They had ideas on paper. We were one of the few that had a true suit. Bf good rich also had a suit. But as fate would have it, we were teamed as a subcontractor. Len and the others at ils were thrilled when he announced the man on the moon returning safely to the earth. They felt that they had the solution but unfortunately for them they recognized that the Small Division of the play Tex Corporation which is what we were had little to offer in the way of Systems Engineering and quality liability thus they teamed us with hampton standard, an aerospace company. It was the right decision ziven all t given all the thought that went into it. We had engineers that could build a suit like this but to have the rigor that nasa was looking for, it wasnt going to happen the way we were set up at the time. So the ils suits, nasas period between is the 62 as we were working with this subcontractor between 62 and 65, the easterly you suits had a long way to go. The basic design is taking shape. If you can imagine how comfortable it is working in that suit, not very. Is the knees and shoulders and elbows had very good mobility. But when you tried to put this big helmet on it, it increased the size of the bulk of the torso section across the shoulders. It just really made for a bulky suit. Again this is the easterly zwrajs zwra stages of apollo. That is the way anything happens, right . You design rockets and the hard twhar goes with it. You have failures and you have to explore along the way. Thats what was happening. So second contract bid. The Company President just told me a story about the fact that they would design something and hamilton would want to test it and test it. And it wasnt you have to test. Trust me. Im git that test things. But there say point where you call it quits. He didnt know what hamilton didnt know when to call it quits. That is part of the problem. There is also the part on hamilton to take the business away from. Ilc. They were bulky but nothing you want to wear for a long mission. Hamilton pursued that. They thought that helmet idea was okay. They took the helmet business away from us in order to free up our engineers. We didnt see it that way. We were making money. You are going to take this business away. That didnt it is well. Finally in february of 1965, hamilton announced nasa that they would be dropping ilc from the team and they would be working with bf goodrich on future suit designs. They started b. F. Goodrich in design different joints. They were a little nervous. They have a contest to decide who the winner would be. Now at this point, keep in mind, gemini suits by david clark were having success. They had a couple suits. They had problems. They had Serious Problems with overheating and mobility. They had a groundwork. Something that was flying anyway. In nasas mind, they thought, maybe david clark will be the suit to go to. But Hamilton Team and they thought okay, b. F. Goodrich and david clark will have a contest to run off and see what would happen. So ilc went to nasa and protested saying, you know, we really got a short end of the deal here when you forced us to team with hamilton. But we understand. We want a second shot at it. Nasa agreed. They learned their lesson on. That they said okay you have six weeks to put the suit in. So for six weeks around the clock, you know, we had a handful of people. We had engineers and se seamstresses. It turned out to be the winning suit. They didnt have good mobility. There were a lot of issues. Even our suit had issues. They were issues we knew could be fixed. When you design something new, you develop it. So thats you see this suit was a lot more form fitting. It was tailored, it was a suit we wanted from the beginning without the hamilton engineers telling us thou build it. It ended up being the a 7 l lunar suit. It started out as ax 5 which is what you saw previously. We eventually made the 7l suit. They did an outstanding job. Hit poor waist mobility though. When they were getting in the command modules, they had a strap to pull to pull the waist together. The arms were not very good. There were a lot of problems with it. And then we get to the model a7 lb suit. In 1968 before we flew apollo 11, we had the engineers go to houston in september 20th and present this suit. At the time we called it the omega suit. It provided increased mobility. Can you see the side view of the suit. There is a zipper. It comes down from the chest and goes across the back. It was a zipper that was a spiral wound zipper. It held it airtight in the suit. It freed up the waist section so we could get mobility in the waist joint. They could sit in the rovers and provide a lot more mobility. We also added a new arm design that they liked. So that really did it justice. It was first presented in 168. At the time they were look forg t looking for the hard suit. They wondered if they wanted us to give them any more work. They liked the suits and immediately asked ilc to certify the arm design so the first lunar crew could have the arms. They expedited the certification process and in late april we began work to remove the arms in Neil Armstrong and buzz aldrins prime suits and replace them with the new arm configuration. This was accomplished by the first week of june 69, a few weeks before the apollo mission. We would constantly get suits after checks and put new zippers in them. This was quite a turn around to take the prime suits for the missions and rip the arms off and put new arms on with the new design and we just certified weeks before. So you could see what our troops were going through at the time. Quite a bit. In 1976, our company had downsized by that time like 25 people. Because we put all our eggs in one basket. We didnt have fwhig left us in. We ran out of gas. There is no other contracts for apollo. So we were down 25 people. We knew if we held on we can win the shuttle contract. We did. And we knew at the time again that we didnt have the resources to do this on our own. So at that point hamilton came us to and we came to them. I didnt know all the specific details. Waits agreed, hamilton said, look, you establish yourself as a space suit provide we are nasa. And we think that we should team up and we will not tell you how to build a space suit. Well be out of the space suit business but a prime contract. And well do the management, you know, configuration management, Systems Engineering and support you. We just figure at the time 25 people had, you know, that was about our only choice. We said yes, lets do. Wended up winning that contract which weve had. Of course, its the International Space station suit now. Our history is constantly evolving. We had 21 suit designs. More than 280 suits. I talked to a couple engineers. Were a little over that. But its just the roll of the dice. Hard to keep track of the suits, designs, and numbers. But that is a rough number. We built for nasa. We have the suit that was worn in space dive, the junk he made from 25 miles up. We built that suit for allen houston and no loss of life or any mishaps due to any space suit assembly. We had minor things happen but nothing that caused the mission any issues on the moon, for sure. And that provided like 440 evas and 3100 total eva hours. There was some issues with suits with the primary lifesupport system. It wasnt our suit. So ilc, we have a use in office. Were developing the next generation suits. Focus on light weight design, less hardware, reconfigureable to fit more Diverse Group of astronauts. Its like soft upper torsos. Can be reconfigured in sizes. The suits are zindesigned for planetary use. We have a lower torso used for extra activity in lower g or put a softer torso up there. So youll have more lower torso mobility. Knee and ankle flex and good fit. The complete design verification by the end of 2019. One of our engineers talked to dave today and i think he said the suit was completed. The design verification test this week. So thats it. Thank you very much. Im going to turn this over to my good friend. Thank you, bill. Do i click . There we go. Sorry. Hi. Im ryan nagata, im an artist and maker in los angeles. Im noenl for making extremely accurate replicas of spacesuits. The suits you see in this photo arent real. Theyre replicas that i made for a photo shoot. There are no photos of both astronauts on the moon. So this is not real. And just to prove it, thats another one in the same photo shoot. And that also never happened on the moon. I make all these spacesuits in my studio in los angeles. This is an a7 lb model suit that i made for a client a few years ago. I fabricate everything for these suits from scratch. Silkscreen the patches and pattern out the fabric pieces. I machine the metal fittings for them. I even cast replica neoprine convolutes for the suits. Not to hold any pressure but to make sure the suits are the right shape. As can you imagine, its taken a tremendous amount of research to make these suits as accurate as possible. There is familiar face there. I was doing some research at ilc a few months ago. The pieces make are almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This is an apollo bubble helmet i made recently. Its blown polly carbonate. Its almost a real helmet. I guess the real question is why do i do all this stuff . I used to work in hollywood as a director. But i would always make a lot of props and costumes for films and tv shows. He commissioned me to make him an apollo suit that he wore on episode on the show. And ever since then, i just had lots and lots of requests to make replica suits for private collectors and museums and also movies. This is allen bean, apollo 12 astronaut who is wearing a replica that i made. It is high praise from him. Allen was also a great artist. He was always looking at the forms and proportions of things. Thats a suit i made for my daughter. I dont just make apollo suits. This is from 1934. This was the first pressure suit and i made this for the stafford air and space museum. That is actually also a photograph i staged. Thats me in that suit. The real suit was on display here. Im told it will be there again. This is mercury suit i did for a film. Gemini suit that i made. Sometimes i want to do stuff from science fiction. This is William Shatners space suit costume from star trek. The helmet was missing. So they used that costume helmet on an episode of mork mindy and never saw it again. This is the real suit but missing the helmet. I fabricated all that just from watching the stills of the show and everything and doing a lot of research. Thats kind of an interesting little thing. That is allen hustus. He donated the suit he wore to the museum but he wanted a lep ricka of it. He asked me if i would do one so i made this. It has a lot of the real components on it. I can cant take credit for the whole thing. The reason im probably here is because of this suit. This is a replica of the x 15 pressure suit. The real one is on left there. And i made this for the Neil Armstrong biopic first man last year. This is the coss assume that Ryan Gossling wore when they recreated one of armstrongs flights. I was also a i made a number of other things for that film. I was also a suit consultant. And helped with a lot of things. Just because of all the research ive done, i get called to advise on these sorts of things. So i did a tremendous amount of research for that suit. This is joe angle who is the last living pilot of the x 15 program. He was a technical consultant on the film. And he just absolutely loved the suit. He said i got it completely right. And he also said this was his favorite suit that he ever wore if you know joe angle, he trained for apollo. He wore apollo suits. He flew on the shuttle. He has worn a lot of pressure suits. He kind of had an emotional moment looking at that suit again. Just those moments that have made this line of work that im in really very rewarding. So anyway, thats it for my intro. So i would like now to introduce nikolai. Im the lead designer and chief engineer from brooklyn, new york. We found a company and after getting a prize for a competition. Two people. [ inaudible ] so my background, im a spa spacesuit designer. I work on spacesuit design all my life. And i tested russian and a lot of american spacesuits. So on the picture, the color picture thats me. And i designed that suit. I have four patents in design and technology. I got green card as a scientists and last year i got american citizenship. [ applause ] so my Business Partner [ inaudible ] we created a company and we have new space suit design. We make space suits and the last contract and this year in 2019 we wanted for moon space boot design. So lets show the assembly. And the elbow joints outperform mobility and bend and torque more than two times. So we build spacesuit gloves for mars in 2015. So we have mobility for that glove. Theyre unique and metacarpal joints. And our material [ inaudible ] its very, very effective. So we have unique mechanical counter pressure design for gloves and assembly. And six nasa tests tested that glove. And thats technology for the future space exploration. So we have a team and we are based in new york city. We have unique service we provide spacesuits experience and 450 people test our spacesuits. We have spacesuits low profile for the glider and more aircraft for High Altitudes. So our intervehicle activities spacesuits have very low weight and high mobility. Our spacesuits are only sold on american soil. And high adjustability and that suit on the picture is 17 inches in height. There is an opportunity suit. And we [ inaudible ] the suit is tested for more than four days and 140 priabales. So our spacesuits tested in the chambers and flight simulators and we passed oxygen testing. Nasa support us and with spacex agreement for certification of our spacesuits for all space flights. So in 2008, five people, four men, one woman in a few days tested the souguit for skydivin and it was for High Altitude jumps. Water express in april 2019. It was second class and connecticut and Survival Systems and together we integrated a company. So thats we have a spacesuit and escape from an iron capsule and woke up to water. So were working on extra vehicular