The father of the space suit, the Calvin Klein of astronautics, was undoubtedly Russell Colley, a B.F. Goodrich engineer and frustrated women's fashion designer...Colley invented a rubber pressure suit and an aluminum helmet for Wiley Post, a one-eyed daredevil who flew his Lockheed Vega, Winnie Mae, to a record 55,000 feet in 1934. Colley stitched the suit together on his wife's sewing machine while Post passed the time teaching their ten-year-old daughter, Barbara, to shoot craps. The metallic cloth and tin-can shaped helmet, complete with an off-center viewing window to accomodate Post's good eye, made him look like he belonged on the set of a Saturday morning sci-fi movie serial. In fact, the celebrated aviator reported that a bystander, seeing him in the eerie getup as he walked away from an emergency landing, took him for a Martian and nearly fainted from fright.
And a little later, this...
It was the combination of artistic imagination and technical expertise, to take only one example, that gave Colley the idea of adapting the movement of a tomato worm to solve a flexibility problem in a space suit. Yet even Russell Colley and his colleagues had one notorious lapse...the space suit designers forgot to provide [Alan] Shepard and the other astronauts with a waste relief system.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend the book - it's almost 700 pages long and is still so broad that it glosses over lots of interesting stories - but every so often the author's droll humour, as above, pokes through the drier facts of US-USSR competition and each country's bureaucratic infighting.
