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.
I was there several months ago. It is awesome. My uncle helped build, design, install and support the Hardball and Rissman systems during the Cold War. It’s back in the corner by the windows.
Great work. But no PLSS? I guess for conservational reasons. Still looks to me incomplete.