Ah, the spacesuit.  The armour of Future Past.  No self-respecting spaceman would be without one.  Since the late 19^th century, there have been all sorts of visions of what the spacesuit would look like, though by the 1940s these had settled down into two distinct types: the heavy, armour-plated number for men, and the  form-hugging spandex cat-suit with transparent goldfish-bowl helmet for women.  Apparently women are much tougher specimens requiring far less protection in hard vacuum.  I mean, what other reason could there be?

But whatever the design, spacesuits tended to share one thing in common-- the remarkable optimism that spacesuits would be relatively simple to design and that using them would be as easy as pulling on a pair of overalls when in reality they are in many ways harder to design than spacecraft and harder to use than mixed-gas deep diving rigs. 

Think about it.  A spacesuit is in many ways a miniature spaceship-- sometimes even with miniature rockets for manoeuvring.  Like a spaceship, it must keep its occupant alive and protected against the hazards of space.  However, the spacesuit has the added problem of needing to be light enough for a man to wear (even in weightlessness mass is a factor because it determines how hard you're going to bump into something) and it has to be flexible enough to allow him to move about and work.  That may not sound like too tall an order, but remember that normal atmospheric pressure is 14.5 pounds to the square inch and that the ideal spacesuit is basically a man-shaped balloon.  Try bending a fully inflated inner tube in half and you have a fairly good idea of how hard it is to make a spacesuit flexible.  Now imagine trying to create not only knee, shoulder and, elbow joints, but ones for the fingers as well.  Then think about how to make a glove flexible, yet keeps the hands warm at over 200° below zero.

Not easy is it?

That's what everyone who has tried to make a real spacesuit learned from the 1930s on.  Even Nasa's state of the art suits are a long way from the coveralls with couple of air bottles and fishbowl school.  They are intricate systems that require about as much training as a light aircraft to use, need at least two people to put on, and even then takes a couple hour to button up because they can only be used at very low internal pressures; the wearer has to breath pure oxygen for a while before starting to suit up and then he must decompress like a deep-sea diver to avoid getting the bends. 

That's today, mind.  In the future it's proposed that this will get even longer as astronauts have their suits literally woven about their bodies.  I hope they remember to bring along a magazine.

And yet if you pop in a video or pick up a sci-fi novel you are sure to run across scenes of people yanking on spacesuits that do not make them look like Michelin men and go rushing out the airlocks in less than five minutes. 

I guess you just can't get tailoring like that anymore.

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