Smithsonian Expert Amanda Young Celebrates the High Fashion of Spacesuits

Spacesuits are the ultimate in couture. Think about it: custom-fit garments, dozens of layers deep, made from innovative textiles that can run $5,000 per square foot, with eye-catching accessories. And the footwear? Near impossible to walk in.

Often, the outfits are worn just once before becoming fragile artifacts that deteriorate and corrode.

"To last was never a consideration," says Amanda Young, spacesuit caretaker for the National Air and Space Museum. "They were built to do their short, hard job with no failures."

Gemini suits, moon-dust-coated boots and Neil Armstrong's gold-visored helmet -- all preserved in the Smithsonian's Paul E. Garber Facility in Suitland under Young's careful watch -- are just some of the stars of her new book, "Spacesuits: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Collection." The book focuses on the evolution from the pressure suits of the 1930s, used by aircraft pilots trying to reach higher altitudes, to the R2-D2-like fiberglass and woven steel suits of the post-Apollo period.

Chunks of foam, scraps of white nylon and various mannequin limbs are scattered about Young's work space. With a mortician's ease, she pulls on a pair of white gloves to inspect another one of her "babies," an Alan Shepard Apollo 14 lunar suit being sent to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"They really are icons of a golden era in history. It was a magical moment," Young says, referring to space missions of the '60s and '70s.

The book "Spacesuits" started about six years ago. Much of the information about the artifacts was stored in Young's head, or scattered among manuals, historical documents and other people's memories. "We had a chairman who used to talk about the 'hit by the bus syndrome' " -- what would happen to all the information should Young disappear?

Or retire. Which, it turns out, 62-year-old Young plans to do at the end of June, after 25 years as the museum, 15 of those as a specialist in spacesuits and astronaut equipment.

What Young originally conceived as a catalogue or set of binders developed into a glossy coffee-table book. She teamed up with Mark Avino, NASM's chief of photographic services, who over a five-year period photographed hundreds of suits, boots, gloves and helmets.

"In the normal course of events, when you're talking about spacesuits you're talking about Neil and Buzz," Young says. And the release of "Spacesuits" couldn't be better-timed: The Apollo 11 mission celebrates its 40th anniversary in July.

Although Young praises lunar suits as "the only bits of cloth that have ever been worn anywhere but Earth and brought back and lived to tell the tale," not all her favorite suits had such illustrious travels. Standing beside a gurney in the air-lock storage room, she pulls a muslin cloth off an 83-pound aluminum "advanced extra-vehicular suit." It has a circular disc at the pelvis that at first looks like something used to help the astronaut relieve himself. Young explains the suit is actually a test model with a built-in bicycle seat that can be raised via a crank at the disc in case the astronaut is sitting down and is too short to see out the helmet visor.

For the Smithsonian's spacesuit collection, another era is nearing an end. The charming native Londoner says her timing of her retirement is fortuitous, considering the impending glut of Apollo festivities. "Notice I'm leaving before the anniversary."