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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.
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