Bound for the Moon: Apollo 11 preparation in photos
Alan Taylor,
The Atlantic

Sure, this more Recommended Looking, but this photo essay is a fascinating look at the process of prepping Apollo 11 for its historic mission.

‘We did the impossible’: What it was like inside Apollo 11’s Mission Control
Ashley Strickland,
CNN

A look inside Mission Control during the Apollo 11 moon landing? Yeah, you’ll want to read this one.

Frankenstein & Sons was founded in 1854 and operated out of the Victoria Rubber Works in Newton Heath, Manchester.

During the Second World War, it started producing highly sophisticated survival gear for aircrew. For a while, Britain protected some of its convoys with Hawker Hurricane fighters that launched from merchant vessels retrofitted with rocket-propelled catapults. Once the pilots had intercepted the enemy — typically long-range reconnaissance planes — they had to eject and wait in the sea for an allied forces pickup. Frankenstein & Sons is thought to have developed a leather-based ‘immersion suit’ and, later, a fabric-based alternative that stopped pilots from catching hypothermia while they waited for a pickup in the icy water.

Over time, planes were developed that could fly higher and higher above the ground. The Royal Air Force (RAF) Physiological Laboratory explored full pressure suits — a complete outfit that offers an artificial environment for the wearer — in the 1940s. The outfits were preferable to full cockpit pressurisation because they had a smaller weight impact and could protect the pilot if the cockpit was pierced by enemy fire and — worst case scenario — required evacuation. The work was developed further with three companies in the 1950s: Siebe Gorman, BWT (Baxter, Woodhouse and Taylor) and Frankenstein & Sons.

All of the prototype suits were tested by the RAF’s Institute of Aviation Medicine (IAM) and the Royal Aircraft Establishment’s (RAE) Mechanical Engineering department in Farnborough.

As the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester explains, these suits were designed to inflate and stabilize the pressure felt by the pilot in the event of decompression inside the cockpit. Many of them looked like rudimentary spacesuits because they were designed for similar levels of elevation and atmospheric problems.

Frankenstein & Sons’ measuring device

Full pressure suits are large and bulky. As a consequence, they have a major impact on the pilot’s reach and flexibility. To tackle this problem, Frankenstein & Sons developed a measuring device with a circular track that extended above the wearer’s head. It allowed the company to take precise measurements and make granular adjustments that maximized the wearer’s reach inside high-altitude aircraft like the Avro Vulcan.

“[Otherwise] the flight engineer sits on the Vulcan, and then you find out that when he puts on a suit he can’t reach the bloody knobs,” Cliff Butterworth, a former Frankenstein & Sons employee told the Science and Industry Museum in 2007. “If he has to turn to keep the aircraft flying… it gets a bit serious.”

NASA, meanwhile, was said to be having problems. The suits it had developed were so restrictive that astronauts couldn’t raise their arms above shoulder level. “Whereas [with] the suit that was developed at Newton Heath,” Fred Evans, another former Frankenstein & Sons employee explained, “the wearer of the suit could scratch the back of his neck.”

Frankenstein & Sons sold one of its measuring devices to NASA for “a very nice profit,” according to Butterworth. Staff interviewed in 2007 say that Ian Wright, an engineer at the company, was also invited to spend a couple of months helping NASA solve some of its mobility problems.

Frankenstein & Sons sold one of its measuring devices to NASA for “a very nice profit.”

Wright clearly loved space. Documents owned by the Science and Industry Museum list him as an attendee for a ‘Commonwealth Spaceflight Symposium’ at the British Interplanetary Society in August 1959. He also held a talk at the Clothing Institute, which involved modelling various Frankenstein equipment, in 1960. “To the conventional tailors present at the meeting, these suits and numerous other garments were like something out of this world,” a report explained. Newspaper articles also show that he appeared on the TV game show What’s my Line wearing a full pressure suit.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the UK continued to test a number of full pressure suits including the Type 51 developed by Frankenstein & Sons. None of the prototypes were given the go-ahead for frontline use, however.

An experimental full pressure suit

Then, in 1959, British physician and RAF squadron leader John Billingham started developing a suit concept that used liquid, rather than air, to regulate temperature.

While he stewed on the idea, NASA continued to pursue spaceflight. In July 1961, Gus Grissom became the second American to travel in space, after fellow Mercury Seven astronaut Alan Shepard. His capsule, nicknamed the Liberty Bell 7, landed in the Atlantic Ocean and opened its hatch cover by mistake. “He panicked and jumped out,” Butterworth said in 2007. “And the water went into his neck. Fortunately for him, they had these (Navy) Seal people ’round.”

According to Butterworth, NASA asked the UK’s Ministry of Defence for help, who explained that it was using sealed ‘neck suits.’ “So they came to us and bought 12 neck suits,” Butterworth told the Science and Industry Museum.

According to Frankenstein employees, at least three suits were sent to NASA over the years.

By 1962, Frankenstein had developed a survival-focused pressure jerkin that, when combined with a partial-pressure helmet and anti-g suit, could keep aircrew alive for up to one minute at 70,000 feet, followed by a rapid descent to 40,000 feet. At the same time, the first liquid-cooled prototype was being developed at Farnborough. It’s not clear if this version was developed by Frankenstein & Sons. Records show that NASA did buy a full pressure suit from the company for $7,150 (or roughly $60,500, adjusted for inflation) in March 1962, however. According to Frankenstein employees, at least three suits were sent to NASA over the years.

Regardless, Billingham was hired the following year to lead NASA’s environmental physiology branch at the Johnson Space Center. In the mid-1960s, he helped finesse the liquid-cooling system that eventually wound up in the Apollo 11 spacesuit.

Frankenstein, meanwhile, was hired to produce liquid-cooled suits for the RAF in 1965. These were meant for low-level flights in hot climates, however, rather than spaceflight. Early trials conducted by pilots in Libya were unsuccessful, however, and the ensuing report effectively delayed the project until 1972.

2001: A Space Odyssey

No matter. In the mid-to-late 1960s, Frankenstein had other projects in the pipeline, including a possible movie spacesuit. Frederick I. Ordway, a scientific advisor for 2001: A Space Odyssey, wrote in a retrospective: “We had our space helmets built, from our designs, at the MV Aviation Co., Ltd of Maidenhead; our spacesuits at the Air Sea Rescue Division, Victoria Rubber Works of the Frankenstein Group, Ltd. of Manchester; and our space pod interiors — instrumentation, controls, displays, etc. — at Hawker Siddley Dynamics at Stevenage not far from our Borehamwood location.”

The company’s involvement has never been confirmed or mentioned beyond this passage, however.

Stanley Kubrick’s movie was released in 1968. One year later, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history by wandering across the Moon together.

It’s impossible to say how heavily Frankenstein’s work influenced NASA’s spacesuit designs. In 2007 and 2010, the Museum of Science and Industry was given numerous boxes filled with material about Wright and Frankenstein & Sons. The material inside, though, is difficult to parse without an employee’s assistance. It’s quite possible that some of the photos and documents will never be truly understood. What has been uncovered, however, suggests that the Manchester company had some impact on the first Moon landing. Frankenstein & Sons never went to space, but there’s a good chance its aviation and survival research did.

Images: NASA (Buzz Aldrin with US flag); Science and Industry Museum (measuring device and experimental full pressure suit); Warner Bros. via AP (2001: A Space Odyssey)

Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land was ignored by most moviegoers. And the few who did catch it were in for something weird: Instead of a jingoistic celebration of American ingenuity and macho astronauts, it was an exploration of loss. The film focuses heavily on the passing of Neil Armstrong’s (Ryan Gosling) young daughter, Karen, but also on the specter of death that haunted everyone being strapped onto a rocket. They weren’t even safe during routine safety checks — it brutally depicts the Apollo 1 command module fire, a freak accident that occurred during a simulated launch, killing the three astronauts aboard. And then there were the family issues: leaving your loved ones in a constant state of panic, and never being around enough to comfort them.

Still, even with death around the corner, First Man brilliantly depicts NASA’s ingenuity during the ’60s, armed with nothing more than math, some very basic computers, and cracker-jack piloting. We get to see Armstrong recover Gemini 8 after it starts rolling out of control. Later, during the Apollo 11 mission, we can feel the panic as he’s forced to manually land the lunar rover, after noticing issues with the initial landing site. We know how the story ends, of course. But the film depicts the personal costs for Armstrong better than anything we’ve seen before.

Where to watch: VOD, HBO, Blu-ray

Chasing the Moon

PBS’s three-part series is similar to Apollo 11, since it’s also relying on newly found footage. But it’s decidedly more intimate. We get to see the inside of Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman’s house, for example, where his wife seems to be dreading the entire ordeal. It’s guided by archived news footage, with some fresh interviews with the likes of Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. And at a lengthy six hours, it has plenty of time to dive into the context of things like what the Space Race actually means.

Where to watch: PBS

Hidden Figures

While astronauts were uniformly white men for decades, women were left to handle much of the computational that actually got them into space. And within that group, there were plenty women of color “computers” who never got their due in popular culture. Hidden Figures follows three notable black women — Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who helped NASA calculate crucial flight trajectories; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer); and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), NASA’s first African-American female engineer — as they fight to make their talents recognized. Even though NASA was still more progressive than most other employers by seeking out women of color, it also forced them to live through plenty of indignities, like being forced to walk long distances to use segregated bathrooms.

Where to watch: VOD, Blu-ray

Also check out:

• The Martian (VOD and HBO): A pro-science look at what our future of Mars exploration could look like.
• Missions to the Moon (National Geographic): A short and sweet documentary that boils down highlights of the Apollo missions.
• The Right Stuff (VOD, Blu-ray): The classic macho astronaut film covering the first batch of Mercury 7 astronauts.

Images: NASA; Hidden Figures: Twentieth Century Fox

The restoration team went out of its way to source authentic material, whether it was wallpaper from the Johnson Space Center or material sourced from eBay.

Thankfully, you’re not limited to gazing from afar. Public tours of Apollo mission control will start on July 1st, 19 days before the Moon landing milestone. There’s certainly a promotional angle here — this is a reminder that NASA has been tasked with returning humans to the Moon by 2024, and that half a century has elapsed since people set foot on the celestial body. Still, this is bound to be valuable for anyone interested in a vivid reminder of space history — it might be as close as you get without visiting the Moon yourself.

You have until the end of 2019 to submit recordings, although you’ll have your “best chance” of making it into the official audio series if you send your file before June 14th. Longer clips may be reserved for the web or social networks.

There’s a certain amount of publicity in this for NASA, especially now that it’s aiming to return people to the Moon by 2024. Nonetheless, the crowdsourced history project shows just how far technology has come in nearly 50 years. When Apollo 11 touched down, viewers usually had to be content sharing their experiences with whoever was in earshot. Now, anyone with a smartphone (which is exponentially more powerful than the Apollo 11’s computers) can potentially share their anecdotes with the entire planet.