99% Invisible - 96- DIY Space Suit

Episode Date: December 3, 2013

Cameron Smith is building a space suit in his apartment. He’s not an astronaut. He’s not even an engineer. Cameron Smith is an archaeologist–on faculty in the anthropology department at Portland State University in Oregon. But Cameron is an explorer … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Superstriresation solenoid switch on. Confirmed. Connect. Coolant hose. Coolant. Pump on. Confirmed. We're going to wait and confirm after suit up. These guys are about to test a space suit. But this is not a recording of an SLAP. This is Cameron Smith's ground floor studio apartment in Portland, Oregon.

That's Julie Sabatier, also from Portland, Oregon. She's a creator of the Public Radio Program and podcasts called Destination DIY. Do we have to say what DIY stands for? Sure, it stands for Do It Yourself. You might think Build Your Own Space View at home is a little extreme on the DIY spectrum. And if you do, I totally agree with you.

It is pretty crazy. We've talked about a lot of kinds of Do It Yourself projects on the DIY spectrum. And if you do, I totally agree with you. It is pretty crazy. We've talked about a lot of kinds of do-it-yourself projects on destination DIY. We have a very broad definition of do-it-yourself. From being your unlawyer to DIY funerals, way beyond the crafts and home improvement projects that might first spring to mine when you hear the words do-it-yourself.

And this is definitely up there with perhaps the most daunting of DIY projects that you could imagine. Sure, there are commercial companies like Virgin Galactic and X-Core creating their own space gear, and they are DIY in the sense that they aren't NASA. But Cameron Smith is hand-crafting his space suit. Under the suit I wear a pair of long johns. I sewed some socks onto them so that they don't slip up

on my legs when I push my legs into the pressure suit. And I sewed, I think I have about 25 feet now of plastic hose that's sewn into the suit and ice water circulates through there and it keeps me cool. And that's absolutely critical. It gets so hot in the suit that you would pass out. I once had a temperature in there,

I think of 117 degrees, but it's really crude. You should see it, you know, I don't have a sewing machine, so I just sit on my bed and I watch, you know, the movie or something and just do it by hand. He's not kidding. The sewing looks like something out of Frankenstein. The second layer of the suit is called the pressure bladder. It's basically forming a bubble around Cameron's body

to hold the air in. The third layer goes over that, and that's the pressure restraint layer. And that's made of panels of non-elastic mesh. It looks like a cargo bag sort of. So those are sewed over the pressure bladder. Because if you were to blow up just the pressure bladder, the suit that contains the gas,

it blows up into sort of like the Michelin man. And you could survive, but you couldn't do anything. You couldn't bend your arms. You would be in kind of a spread-eggled position just sort of floating there. You couldn't do anything. You couldn't bend your arms, you would be in kind of a spread-eagle position just sort of floating there. You couldn't do anything. Total cost of Cameron Smith's space suit, 2,000 bucks. Around 100 of 1% of the cost of the latest NASA space suit. This technology over the last 40 odd years has become much cheaper, much more available and better. You can essentially build, do it yourself space program today and now luckily I'm part of that.

Cameron is not an astronaut, he's not even an engineer, he's actually an archaeologist, he's on faculty in the anthropology department at Portland State University. But Cameron is an explorer by nature, he's been diving in Puget Sound, survived Arctic winters in Iceland and Alaska, and summited Oregon's Mount Hood more times than he can count. The space suit is his latest and most ambitious project. Showing that it's possible to do it cheaply is, I guess, my part of this larger movement of opening space up to many rather than few.

The space suit has been three years in the making. You only have to look around Cameron's tiny apartment to see how committed he is to this project. Instead of hanging art on the wall, Cameron has each of the suit's three layers hanging side by side next to his bed, which is surrounded by bookshelves cramped full of NASA patents and other research materials. His living room serves as the staging area for the gas canisters and the gondola where he tests the suit. Eventually, he wants to connect

that gondola and all of the life support gear to a balloon that will take him 50,000 feet in the air. He is also sewing the balloon himself. At 50,000 feet above the surface of the earth, camera will experience space-like conditions. And that means he'll need his suit to protect him from extreme temperatures and decompression sickness. And that's what you get from going from sea level to high altitude, less pressure, and you decompress your body starts to swell up.

Nitrogen bubbles in your tissues start to come out of solution and they give you the bends. It's just what divers get, decompression sickness. A suit with even three pounds of pressure per square inch can keep a person healthy at high altitude conditions. And that's just about what Cameron suit holds on a good day. He's worked hard to try to close off all the leaks, but it's an ongoing process.

And Cameron knows what you think of this. I really didn't want people to think I was crazy. And I was really worried about that because, you know, when you say, oh, a balloon and an open gondola underneath that the first thing people think about is they say, hey, do you remember that guy who went up in a balloon in a lawn chair, right? A lawn chair Larry? Crazy dude.

That's exactly what people think. But not everyone. Cameron has attracted a small team of student volunteers That's exactly what people think. But not everyone. Cameron has attracted a small team of student volunteers who are committed to making the technology of space travel more accessible. In the spring of 2013, they started doing weekly tests. Shipbox, BG levers, one, two, and three open. BG levers, one, 2, and 3 are open.

They check off items on an exhaustive list, making sure the breathing gas, pressure gas, and suit coolant are all in place. The most expensive part of the suit and the only part of the suit that Cameron didn't build himself is the Soviet Air Force helmet he bought on eBay. The helmet is an exception to my general rule of, you know, I want to build it from things that you can easily access or basically not use things from the production system, typically military production systems, that have already sorted out all the problems. I didn't want to do that. I want to solve the problems myself. Why? I mean, why reinvent the wheel? These problems have presumably been solved by other

people, obviously, because people have been in space before. That's a great question. Why reinvent the wheel? Why redo the... It is an incredible thrill for me personally to beat my head against a problem and I can't figure it out and then one day I'm walking home or I'm on the street car and it's a Eureka moment. And it's so thrilling. I got it and I have to almost run home and build the thing and see if it works. So for me, you know, it's an intellectual adventure. It's, oh my gosh, can I figure out the math? Can I mix the gases properly? Can I make this thing hold pressure? Can my mind, can I with my mind, solve these problems? So it's a lot of fun.

When Cameron puts the suit on, he starts out on the floor. He has to wriggle and shimmy his way into the suit's outer layers. So right now I'll just put my leg up like that and Ben can start getting my foot down. Ben, I blocked the inhale valve on the ONM. You can inhale, but you can't exhale. It's a minor problem, we will fix it. That doesn't sound like a minor problem. What I mean is that the mechanism is so simple that I believe it can be fixed.

We just haven't got the solution yet. It turns out Cameron isn't the only one on the metaphorical floor wriggling into his homemade space suit. I could actually start a whole new radio show just about the DIYers who are trying to get themselves into space. There's this Danish company called Copenhagen Suborbidals, and they're building rockets and space capsules in an abandoned shipyard in Denmark. These guys have the goal of suborbital flight in mind, like Ellen Shepherd, they'll just go up and come right back down again rather than orbiting the Earth like John Glenn.

Copenhagen suborbitales and Cameron Smith, the space suit guy, they've actually been working together. Christian Von Bengston is the co-founder of Copenhagen suborbidals, and he's talking to Cameron about building suits for them to use once they're ready to replace their crash test dummy with a live human being. Christian's approach to building his space capsule is right in line with what Cameron is doing with his suit. A lot of the stuff we're buying is, you know, the Danish equivalent to Home Depot. Take, for example, the heat shields. NASA has used some pretty fancy materials like reinforced carbon and high-purity silica fiber

to create heat shields for the shuttle and other vehicles. For the space capsule, we have a heat shield made of cork, which is just bought at a local carpet shop. Did you say cork like CORK? Exactly. And a lot of people find it funny that we use cork as a heat shield and it might be a bit funny, but it's a perfect solution for it. What would be the wood-based equivalent of steam punk?

Tree punk, bark punk, wood punk, arbor punk. Arbor punk. I like that one. Anyway, both of these examples, may on the surface, seem as removed as possible from the sleek, polished, and perfectly engineered products of NASA. I mean, their heat shields made out of cork. But they all possess the same problem-solving genius needed to allow humans to exist in

an environment where no human has any business be. One of my favorite scenes in any movie is an Apollo 13. When the ground-based crew realizes that they have to adapt the square carbon dioxide air filters from one part of the ship to fit into the round carbon dioxide scrubber in another part of the ship or all the astronauts will fixate and die. We're about to scrubbers on the command module. They take square cartridges. It's one's on the lemma round. Tell me this isn't a government operation. It's just isn't a contingency we've remotely looked at.

Those CO2 levels are going to be getting toxic. Well, I suggest you generally then wait to put a square peg in a round hole. Rapidly. That's the sound of the NASA engineers throwing all the available materials on the spaceship on a table. We gotta find a way to make this fit into the hole for this. Use the nothing but that. Let's get it organized.

Okay, let's build the shelter. Let me get some coffee going too. So when I think of Cameron, I think less lawn chair Larry, and more 60s engineers sporting the horn rims and the short sleeve shirt with a tie, he's scattering the parts across the table and attacking the problem. When I have to design something very specific, and I have to look to how other people have done it, if I can't figure it out myself, almost always it's the Russian spacesuits that I'm modeling after.

They never had as much money. And so they had to do things in a more inventive way. Whether you're in a garage or at a big company or in a gondola if it'd be thousand feet, the design process is the same. Research, express the prototype, test and cycle. But with Cameron's project, the stakes are significantly higher.

It would be so embarrassing to get killed in it, you know. So, I'm going to make it work. Notice that he said embarrassing in that sentence, not terrifying. Which, to me, sounds just like an astronaut. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Julie Sabatia, creator of the Public Radio program and podcast Destination DIY. The show is currently fundraising on Indie Go Go to produce more stories of makers, builders and offbeat creators.

If you want to pitch in like I did, you can do a search on Indie Go Go for Destination DIY or go to destination diy.org. One of the rewards packages includes a really great set of zines on how to make radio. I think many of you will enjoy. The program is destination DIY, search for it on Indiegogo. 99% invisible is Sam Green span Avery Troubleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, Sam tweets at Sam listens,

Every tweets at Trufflemen, that's the E before the L But right now on our website, we have a couple of really fantastic pictures of Cameron's homemade space suit. It really is a work of art. pictures of camera and homemade space suit. It really is a work of art. Check it out at 99pi.org. Radio tempi. Radio tempi. Radio tempi.

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