When the first manned missions started, NASA had more to worry about than photography. In fact, the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, picked up a $40 Minolta Ansco Autoset 35mm camera himself from a Florida camera shop. The third man in space, Walter Schirra, did the same thing, but went upscale by purchasing a $500 Hasselblad 500C medium format camera, recommended to him by Life and National Geographic photographers.

NASA grasped the promotional benefits of space photos, and liked what they saw with Schirra’s Hasselblad. Engineers modified the camera to reduce weight and make it easier to handle, while equipping it with a custom side-finder that could be easily used with a helmet and visor.

For the Apollo missions, the 500C was replaced with a more advanced, motorized Hasselblad 500 EL (below). NASA also added a “Réseau plate” — responsible for the faint crosses in the photo above — that would allow for distortion correction in post-processing. That model was subsequently used by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders to take Earthrise, a photo that’s at least as famous as Armstrong’s shot. (To save weight, all 12 Hasselblad 500 ELs were left on the Moon’s surface.)

Neil Armstrong with a customized Hasselblad 500 EL

Armstrong was well-equipped and in the right place. If that was all there was to it, though, everyone with enough cash for a fancy camera would be taking great photos (spoiler: they’re not). To that end, NASA embarked on surprisingly comprehensive photography training program for astronauts.

According to NASA,”over the several years prior to the Moon missions, scientific and photographic training was provided. The crews visited geologic sites in Nevada, Arizona, and Hawaii… completely outfitted with sample bags, checklists, simulated backpacks… and Hasselblad EL cameras similar to those they would use on the Moon. The astronaut would point his body in order to aim the cameras. Films taken during the practice exercises were processed and returned to the crewmen who would study the results.”

Armstrong clearly mastered the lessons. The photo conveys what Aldrin called the “magnificent desolation” of the surface, while capturing the wonder and gravitas of the occasion. It paints both astronauts as anonymous explorers, coming in peace to an unconquerable black and white world. In the place of Aldrin’s face, there’s a reflection of the spaceship and nearly everything the astronauts brought, as well as Armstrong himself — one of the few images in which he appears.

The mission is a relatively routine one, but symbolizes how much spaceflight and the US space program have changed in half a century, for better or for worse. In 1969, the US and Russia were the only two countries to have sent people into space — while they’re still dominant, it’s now common for people from other nations to make the journey. The first space station, Russia’s Salyut 1, hadn’t reached orbit 50 years ago, but the present-day ISS has been in service for nearly 21 years. And the use of a Russian Soyuz rocket is emblematic of both greater international cooperation (however tentative it may be) and the gap in US spaceflight capabilities until the Space Launch System is hopefully ready in 2020.

An actual trip to the Moon will have to wait until 2024, when NASA hopes to once again put people on the lunar surface through its Artemis program. The timing isn’t ideal, then. All the same, it’s good to know that humanity isn’t staying on terra firma during such an important historic milestone.

Microsoft and NASA’s partnership began on June 28th, 2015 as part of Project Sidekick when a SpaceX supply rocket docked with the ISS and delivered the headsets to the waiting astronauts. “HoloLens and other virtual and mixed reality devices are cutting edge technologies that could help drive future exploration and provide new capabilities to the men and women conducting critical science on the International Space Station,” Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS program at NASA said in a 2015 press release. “This new technology could also empower future explorers requiring greater autonomy on the journey to Mars.”

Aboard the ISS, crews utilized the HoLolens’ “Remote Expert Mode” in many of their tasks. Remote Expert connects the wearer with an Earth-based technician from the flight control team via Skype, allowing them to see what the astronaut is seeing and advise accordingly. The headsets could also be deployed in Procedure Mode, which played locally-stored animated holographic illustrations for times when an expert wasn’t available.

Project Sidekick was short lived, only running until the following March. However, a few months later in the summer of 2016, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida launched “Destination: Mars,” a mixed reality guided tour of the Red Planet narrated by none other than Buzz Aldrin. Visitors were taken on a walking tour of several Martian sites using images captured by the Curiosity Mars Rover.

“This experience lets the public explore Mars in an entirely new way. To walk through the exact landscape that Curiosity is roving across puts its achievements and discoveries into beautiful context,” said Doug Ellison, visualization producer at JPL, said in a press release at the time. The OnSight application, which actually stitched those captured images together, went on to win NASA’s 2018 Software of the Year award.

Augmented reality has also found its way into spacecraft design and production with incredible results. Take the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, for example. It’s currently being developed by NASA and the ESA and built by Lockheed Martin. The 4-person crew capsule is designed to ride atop the Space Launch System during the Artemis lunar exploration missions as well as to Mars.

It’s also a fantastically complex piece of engineering. The Orion’s assembly manual alone is a 1,500 page behemoth, requiring technicians to constantly flip back and forth between the instructions and the task at hand. But that’s where the HoloLens comes in.

“Manufacturing was a good place to start because it’s easier to quantify what we’re seeing in terms of a comparison between traditional methods and what AR helping would take,” Shelley Peterson, the principal engineer for Augmented & Mixed Reality at Lockheed Martin Space, told Engadget.

Using the same Procedure Mode as aboard the ISS, Lockheed’s teams were able to drastically reduce the amount of time needed to assemble the spacecraft’s various systems. The team was able to cut down the time spent joining components and torquing bolts to precise specifications by 30 to 50 percent. Rather than having to thumb through the instructions to know how many pounds of pressure a specific bolt requires, that information is displayed directly atop the bolt by the HoloLens, Peterson explained.

“More recently, we’ve been working with position alignment of objects,” she continued. It really just changes things when you can see within your environment where you’re needing to place an object, instead of having to measure or use other methods. It’s a fantastic way to represent the data.”

What used to take a technician a full 8-hour shift to complete can now be done in 15 minutes, Peterson said. What would take a pair of technicians three days to do can now be done by a single technician in two and a half hours. “At Kennedy Space Center, we had an activity that normally takes eight shifts,” Peterson said. “They completed it in six hours.”

The HoloLens doesn’t just reduce the amount of time (and money) spent putting the Orion together, it also helps to mitigate uncertainty in the manufacturing process and prevent costly mistakes. “If [the technicians are] trying to interpret a 2D drawing or 3D model on a 2D screen, and make that mental translation to what it means to the object in the room, there’s still some questions,” Peterson explained, “and they’d like to be absolutely certain when they’re working on the spacecraft.”

Peterson also points to the headsets’ ease of use. A technician typically needs less than a half hour to get orient themselves with the system before jumping into their tasks. “They’re able to put it on and just start working,’ she continued. The current iteration of the HoloLens is still a bit heavy to be worn all day, though technicians can wear them for up to three hours before tiring, or simply pop the headset on and off as needed throughout the day.

The only major sticking point that Peterson notes is the difficulty in entering data. “We need a better way to type or to take the place of typing — voice doesn’t quite do it just yet,” Peterson said. “There’s times where we need to enter data, or capture data as we’re working and they have to move across to a Bluetooth keyboard.” That takes the technician out of their workflow, which is what the HoloLens was designed to minimize in the first place.

Lockheed isn’t the only organization leveraging AR technology in its manufacturing process. Rival aerospace company BAE has also paired with Microsoft, using HoloLens to eliminate the need for paper assembly manuals in its electric bus division, while a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have used the tech to design their Dragonfly rotorcraft lander.

The Dragonfly will be heading deep into our solar system when it launches towards Saturn’s moon, Titan, in 2025. It’ll take a whopping nine years to get to the moon’s surface but once there, the Dragonfly’s exploration will help unlock the mysteries of our home system and maybe even — fingers crossed — give us our first glimpse at extraterrestrial life.

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

As such, NASA has spent decades working to ensure that, when it sends crews beyond the atmosphere, they’ll possess the talent and training required to do their duties and return safely. As we look towards Mars — and its two-plus year round trip — NASA faces an unprecedented challenge in doing so.

Even on relatively short stints aboard the ISS, astronauts face a number of challenges and contributing factors that can wear on them physically and emotionally. Those include potential personality and cultural conflicts or communication issues with foreign crewmates, the monotony and boredom of performing daily maintenance on the station, physiological changes due to microgravity and isolation, worries of radiation exposure and disruptions to their circadian rhythms. Astronauts on the ISS are essentially stuck in a little bubble of habitable atmosphere with only five other people for six months at a time or more. That’s enough to make all but the most psychologically sturdy go a bit stir crazy.

Per NASA’s research, US astronauts suffered 1,800 in-flight medical events over the course of 89 shuttle missions between 1981 and 1998. Fewer than 2 percent of those were due to behavioral health issues and among those, the most common complaint was “anxiety and annoyance.” Conversely, Space Adaptation Syndrome — wherein astronauts suffer from motion sickness, headaches, and facial stiffness until they grow accustomed to life in microgravity — accounted for 40 percent of medical issues over the same span.

That’s not to say astronauts don’t go a little crazy from time to time. The Soyuz 21 mission in 1976 had to be abandoned when the cosmonaut crew all noticed a strong odor in the capsule. The source of the smell was never found and the entire incident was chalked up to a shared, stress-induced delusion among the crew. In 1989, shuttle commander David Walker, recently returned from his first mission and in the midst of a bitter divorce, piloted a T-38 jet within 100 feet of a Pan American commercial flight. While NASA never officially cited post-mission stress as a contributing factor to the near disaster, the agency did remove Walker from command and grounded him from missions until 1992.

More recently, in 2007 astronaut Lisa Nowak drove non-stop 900 miles across the country, armed with an adult diaper, bb gun, mallet and knife to confront a romantic rival at the Orlando airport. After failing to pepper spray her rival, Nowak was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Her legal team pursued an insanity defense following a diagnosis that Nowak suffered from a brief psychotic disorder and major depression after returning from her recent Discovery mission.

“Anecdotal and empirical evidence indicate that the likelihood of an adverse cognitive or behavioral condition or psychiatric disorder occurring greatly increases with the length of a mission,” NASA’s Human Research Program found during a subsequent study on astronaut psychological health. “Further, while cognitive, behavioral, or psychiatric conditions might not immediately and directly threaten mission success, such conditions can, and do, adversely impact individual and crew health, welfare, and performance.”

NASA’s first line of defense against this happening is its brutal astronaut selection process. Many candidates come from high-pressure fields such as fighter pilots and physicians, inherently dangerous, high-stakes professions where a wrong move can prove fatal. The ability to quash fear and anxiety to overcome a challenge is of paramount importance. Astronauts “already know [they] can meet stressful challenges,” NASA senior operational psychologist Dr. Jim Picano told Astronaut in January, “and [they] believe [they] can overcome these things.”

A rigorous training regimen helps iron out any remaining doubts the candidates may have. “The training that astronauts receive shapes their confidence in the procedures and equipment they have, to deal with spaceflight commands as well as emergencies,” he continued. “Rehearsing these over and over again…brings a sense of preparation that allows them to believe they can influence and change their circumstances for the better.”

Of course, confidence can only get one so far in the selection process. Out of the 18,000-odd applicants, only a pool of 60 or so will eventually be eligible to go to space. NASA rates each of these applicants on nine separate “suitability proficiencies“

• The ability to perform under stressful conditions

• Group living skills

• Teamwork skills

• Self-regulation of emotions and mood

• Motivation

• Judgement and decision making

• Conscientiousness

• Communication skills

• Leadership skills

And that’s just the start. Candidates are subjected to hours of psychiatric screening during the selection process to ensure that they have “the right stuff” for a given mission. Once selected, astronauts must then go through multiple additional batteries of psychological evaluation and support during the run up to launch, while on mission, and after they return. While aboard the ISS, crews participate in psychological conferences with ground-based medical staff, for example.

Additionally, NASA takes great pains to keep astronauts aboard the ISS in contact with their friends, families, and the public to help counter the enormous psychological stresses they experience. NASA provides its ISS astronauts access to social media accounts, satellite phones and video conferences for communicating with family, media downloads for keeping up with the latest TV seasons, and regular care packages from Earth. Astronauts are also encouraged to take up hobbies while aboard the space station; be it photography, reading or in Commander Chris Hadfield’s case, recording a guitar album in microgravity.

NASA is also looking into less invasive ways of monitoring its astronauts’ mental health while in space. “Researchers funded by NASA have been experimenting with visual recognition technology,” Dr. Lawrence Palinkas, professor of Social Policy and Health at the University of Southern California, told Engadget. The same sort of technology that law enforcement agencies are using to track and identify people could eventually be used to subtly keep tabs on a crewmate’s psychological state. “If aberrations or abnormalities are detected, a psychologist is armed with more detailed information on how to respond adequately,” he said.

Still, Mars is 35 million miles from the Earth, even at their closest orbital points. Getting there and back will take a minimum of two and a half years. “Mars is a long way away, and the extreme distance has psychological ramifications,” Dr. Nick Kanas, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, told the American Psychological Association in 2018. “It will be hard to have the kind of social novelty we crave.” Given the scope of the mission, multiple nations’ respective space agencies will be involved and likely sending astronauts of their own.

Dr. Phyllis Johnson, associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, has recently performed research into the effects that these sorts of dangerous and remote jobs have on family members left behind. “We’re looking at how [astronauts] create, or do they create, a shared space culture,” she told Engadget. “Or are they going to be separate entities of ‘I’m my national culture. So I’m an American there first, and I’m a Canadian, and I’m a German, or I’m from a particular space agency.'”

“Are they developing something that encompasses all of it,” she continued, “and do they see it as recreating some traditions — customs that we’re doing as a team — that are carried forward by other groups.”

That community will be vital given that the further they travel from Earth, the longer the communications lag grows. By the time the time they make it to Mars, signals from Earth will need a full 20 minutes to get there. Combined with an equally long trip back and the time needed to compose a reply, astronauts will be looking at a 40 minute lag at the very least. That will make telephone-style conversations impossible.

“Undoubtedly protocols that will have to be established for how that form of communication takes place,” Palinkas said, “and how questions and answers are bundled together to minimize disruption to the normal flow of conversation.”

NASA isn’t planning on sending a crew to the Red Planet for nearly another decade, not when there’s so much Moon to explore and potentially exploit. This should give the space agency sufficient time to further mature the technologies and flight systems needed to keep its astronauts alive, and more importantly, thriving, during their perilous journey.