The Playtex Spacesuit

At the risk of turning this into a space blog, here's one more space related post.

From Wired...

Neil Armstrong’s first footfall on the moon was one small step for man, but it was one giant leap for a maker of ladies’ girdles. He wouldn’t have had such a snazzy spacesuit were it not for an epic struggle between a by-the-book defense contractor and a lingerie company run.

As chronicled in Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, the battle started in 1962. International Latex Corporation (which you may know by its current name, Playtex) won a contract to develop the Apollo spacesuit. But rather then let ILC go it alone, NASA forc[ed] it to work as a subcontractor of aerospace conglomerate Hamilton Standard. Suspicious of Playtex’s freewheeling fashion-industry ways, Hamilton started on its own prototype, the Tiger, which is what got submitted to NASA. The suit was a flop, and Hamilton blamed ILC, which lost its subcontractor status.

But Apollo still needed a spacesuit, so NASA set up its own version of Fashion Week, inviting two manufacturers to submit prototypes. So three years after winning (and then losing) the contract, a dozen ILC staffers picked the locks of their old offices at Hamilton and stole back their designs. Working round-the-clock shifts for six weeks, they finished a brand-new suit in time to be a dark-horse third entry in the 1965 competition. It won, acing 12 of the 22 tests—and since one rival suit wouldn’t fit through the door of the space capsule, and the helmet of the other exploded, there was no runner-up.