{"product_id":"9780262015202","title":"Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePlaytex'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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eSpacesuit\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49990918963440,"sku":"9780262015202","price":40.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780262015202","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}