The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The team that fashioned Apollo 11 (Interview)

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

We're helping Atlassian to promote Season 2 of Teamistry. If this is the first time you're hearing about this podcast, Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways, to achieve remarkable things. Today, we're sharing a full-length episode from Season 1 which tells the story of the team that fashioned the Apollo 11 spacesuits. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon for the first time, we don't actually see his face. We see his moonsuit. That moonsuit — in effect — is Neil Armstrong; an inseparable part of this historic moment. While the spacesuit kept him alive to tell that story in his own words, what went unnoticed is the extraordinary team that stitched it together.

What's up, friends? We're helping Atlassian to promote season two of Teamistry. If this is the first time you're hearing about this podcast, Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways to achieve remarkable things. And today, we're sharing a full-length episode from season one. I helped handpick this episode for you to listen to.

It tells the story of the team that fashioned the Apollo 11 spacesuits. To preface this episode, we have to go back to that moment when Neil Armstrong stepped out on the moon for the first time. We don't actually see his face. We see his moon suit.

And that moon suit, in effect, is Neil Armstrong. Now, while the suit kept him alive to tell the story in his own words, what went unnoticed is the extraordinary team behind the scenes that made the suit in the first place. Search for Team History anywhere you listen to podcasts. We've included links in the show notes for you to check out.

And many thanks to our friends at Team History for their support. All right, here we go. Joanne Thompson has a special relationship with the moon. I love to look at the moon. Just look at it. I even had a dream one time that I went to the moon. And you know when the moon looks just like a piece of mist up there? That's how it was in my dream. I got there and I said, where am I supposed to put my feet?

Even though Joanne's only been to the moon in her dreams, something she made has been there. Something that actually made traveling to the moon possible. Joanne, along with a team of seamstresses in the 1960s, including Gene Wilson, sewed together the spacesuits worn by the Apollo 11 astronauts. The person that we were making the suit for, that astronaut, who was a human being, his life was in our hands if we didn't make that suit right. That's how important it was. Jean and Joanna and a whole group of seamstresses were part of a team that included engineers and scientists working on something where the stakes

were literally life and death. It was the most difficult challenge these women had ever faced at a time when women were rarely heard or empowered. It was an era of prejudice and chauvinism and without built-in pragmatism and humility that some of the engineers had, there wouldn't have been anyone listening

as closely to the seamstresses as was necessary. I'm Gabriella Cowperthwaite, and this is Teamistry, an original podcast from Atlassian. This show is all about the chemistry of teams and what happens when people are so open to new ideas of working, innovating, and expressing themselves together. They end up doing something amazing. I remember looking up in the night sky when I was very little and thinking the moon was this abstract yellow circle, like something out of a storybook. When I got older, it started seeming so strangely close, like this floating three-dimensional object within our reach. And I remember wondering what it would feel like to bounce around on the lunar surface. We copy you down, Eagle.

Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. And while most of us have seen the images and the video of the moon landing, there's one part of this story I never thought about. Those big, white, puffy outfits the astronauts were wearing. Where did they come from? And who made them?

Especially when no one had ever done anything like this before. Well, we have to go back a few years before the landing to find out. It's 1966, and a company named ILC in the town of Dover, Delaware, has won a contract to make spacesuits for NASA's Apollo program. Now, you may have never heard of ILC, which stands for the International Latex Corporation, but you probably have heard of their biggest division at the time. Gee whiz, ladies. Don't you wish you had a bra that would support you and make you feel shapelier?

One that would cross your heart? That's right, Playtex. The company that made flexible, comfortable bras and girdles was going to use that know-how to make outfits for walking on the moon. To do that, they needed to build a team. And not just the team you'd expect, scientists and engineers, but a team that included dozens of seamstresses. I had a four-year-old daughter, and my babysitter asked me on my day off if I would go with her to IOC because they were hiring to make a spacesuit.

And I hadn't really kept up with the news because I was busy. And so I didn't really know anything about it. That's Joanne Thompson again, the woman who dreams of the moon. So I took the sewing test too, and I passed. So I went back to my dress factory and gave them two weeks notice. And in two weeks, I was working on a moon suit. Meanwhile, Jean Wilson was also a seamstress in Dover, and her older sister worked at Playtex. She told me about the job openings they were having.

They needed seamstresses to work on their palace spaces. So I applied. And when I applied and they found out my credentials and my experience and everything else, they hired me. And at that time, I was about 18. engineering, but they were really good sewers. So when they were asked to create the finest, straightest, and tightest stitches possible, and then to replicate them over and over, well, they aced those tests. I had been taught to sew when I was really young by my aunt. She was a good seamstress. So I had been sewing, making my own clothes, making clothes for other people, making quilts and doll clothes and lots of different things. So I had a lot of experience sewing. I came from a family of 13 children. I was number 10 and my mother had four daughters

and I was one of them. She taught us all how to sew. But regardless of how good they were, nothing prepared them for the kind of work they were about to do, which started with more tests and training. It was that type of job where you had to go through training. We learned how to read blueprints, you know, the way everything was laid out for the way the suits had to be made and everything else. So it was a lot involved.

We were given pieces of fabric that we were supposed to cut into certain sizes and stitch them together and make seams on them. And copy the seams that were projected for the suit. Every seam, you had to make sure you had the right amount of stitches for that seam so that it could bear the load. And so we had quite a bit to learn. Yeah, don't forget, sewing something that had to withstand the vacuum of space, that was a challenge none of them had ever faced. Bill Aries started working at ILC after the Moon program as quality

manager and company historian. Any of the ladies that either came from Playtex or let's say they came from a company making draperies, you were sewing at a pretty fast rate. We're making big rows of stitches and garments or draperies and it wasn't a real detail-oriented job. But when you're working on a spacesuit, your machine is running very slowly as you're guiding these materials under the sewing machine. So it takes a lot of patience. It was very tedious work. And of course, the seamstresses were only one part of the larger team, a team that included other folks who were also new to the space industry.

You had to have configuration management experts, quality management and quality engineers. And this team just grew exponentially because to this 900 people because that's what NASA expected to have the rigor because these suits were going to sustain life on the moon. You see, ILC got the contract to make the moon suits because they had the most promising prototype. But their team needed to scale up massively to produce something that had to meet the requirements of the mission to the moon. And not just scale up. I mean, just how do you make sure you have the people you need when you've never done something like this? Well, that means a long, slow process

of bringing in as much diversity of expertise as you can, all the while reconfiguring the team until you have the best setup. I think NASA's instinct that a certain kind of teamwork was necessary was a very, very good instinct of bringing very different kind of people together in the same organization. Nicholas DeMancho is the author of Spacesuit, Fashioning Apollo. He studied the different groups that were brought together by NASA to form the Moonsuit team.

The first were people like George Derny and Len Shepard, people who had no engineering training, but who were incredibly mechanically adept. And these people called themselves the Hard Knoxers. These guys had only graduated from the school of hard knocks, quote unquote. So just think about that for a second. Some of the folks who had to build the first suits to keep astronauts alive on the

surface of the moon had no formal education to do just that. And while Len Shepard had worked in the industrial section of Playtex, George had been a sewing machine salesman. They weren't engineers, but they knew about manufacturing. Then you had a second group of engineers, people like Mel Case, Al Gross, and Homer Ream, who were young engineers. Most of them just went to the University of Delaware and were hired locally. They were very well trained, but they were very open because they were so young. And then, of course, you had the seamstresses. Some of them had worked with George and Len, but never with aerospace engineers who had never worked with garment

makers. The scenes that have been described to me from that period were three people sitting around a sewing machine. One of them would be a seamstress. One of them would be an engineer. Another one of them would be one of these hard knocks or engineers. The seamstress would be explaining what the fabric could do. The other engineer might be explaining what the stainless steel fitting could do. And then the more trained engineer could be thinking of how such a thing could be conceived of to meet tolerances or production processes. So instead of putting these seamstresses, the technicians and the engineers in different silos, there would be these moments when experts from all three would come together, bringing their different perspectives to bear on a super complex problem.

This is, of course, a powerful team superpower, which I'll call multi-part harmony. Now picture, in that scene you just heard about, 18-year-old Gene Wilson. I moved up in a position where I was a lead sewer. So I was like a supervisor over several other women. And then also the color of my skin. I am an African-American.

And at that time, I was known and labeled as the color girl. This is one of the most challenging things that happened in this story that made this story possible. Even in a society crippled with racism, chauvinism, and ageism, the team and mission still moved forward. To help put a man on the moon. To understand just how unique this was, especially having women in a highly technical workspace providing feedback and input, we have to remember what things were like in 1960s America.

Here's an excerpt from a short film about a new space-age ceramic at the time called Pyroceram. Three out of four new household products just don't sell. Or to put it another way, the women of America won't buy three out of every four new products offered to them for their homes because they aren't what women want. How can industry be sure that what it makes are the things that people really

want? It starts with men. Designers, engineers, production men. First, they determine what things can be made better with pyroceram. That's obviously about the role of women in American society at the time. Add to that an African-American woman. Remember, this is only 10 years after Rosa Parks made her stand, by sitting down, on a Montgomery bus. This is taking multi-part harmony to another level. Not just diversity in expertise, but diversity in background and perspective. Nicholas paints a picture of what this looked like, including one of the lead seamstresses, Roberta Pilkington. It was Len Shepard and Roberta Pilkington sitting in a pool of light over a sewing machine

going back and forth and back and forth with a single part. And Shepard asking repeatedly, well, can it be done this way? Or can it be done this way? And Roberta or Bert, as everyone called her, pushing back and saying, fabric can't do that.

Fabric can't do that. Fabric can do this. Homer Ream, one of the original engineers on the program that Nicholas mentioned earlier, remembers one of these moments. He was called to the floor by quality inspector Madeline Ivory,

who had been working with the seamstresses. She told him a stitch the engineers wanted just wasn't working. And I would go, what's the matter with it, Madeline? Well, if you put a little stress on it, the seam will rake. It's not the right kind of seam. It ought to be a turned and overlap seam. This, of course, is one of the advantages of having such a diverse team.

Access to expertise the engineers didn't have, didn't even know they needed. As in the scene you just heard about, the seamstresses knew from experience how a certain type of stitch or seam would hold up under stress. That knowledge would get integrated into how a part was designed so that when it all came together, strength and integrity weren't compromised. Bill thinks, though, that this relationship between the engineers and the seamstresses might have been a bit rocky at times. Back then, the folks like George Derny, some of the engineers, pretty headstrong, pretty egotistical type people, that it was their way.

If it were George Derny and he's going to go talk to these ladies about getting seams sewn a certain way. They kind of expected that, but yet there might have been pushback from the seamstresses because perhaps they couldn't make it that way. And so there had to be a trade-off, but there was probably a little irritation in between. Gene, though, remembers a balanced give and take. I can honestly say every person that I work with on this, especially the engineers, none of them would talk down to us or act like, oh, we're just seamstresses, we're just sewers or whatever. They would not have their jobs if they didn't have someone like the women that do help them with the sewing and everything because they didn't know how to sew. There was never, it was never a disagreement like, well, the suit needs to be made this way.

And then that would be what the scientists would say. And then the engineers or designers would say something else. And then they'd just go separate ways. It didn't work that way. As Nicholas points out, this multi-part harmony was a remarkable working relationship because of when we're talking about. You know, this was the 1960s. This was not a moment where women participated equally in administrative and organizational teams with men, if we could even say that today. And they clearly understood that they had to figure out also how to get their expertise into the process. And so

they were managing too, even if they were managing from below. When Nicholas thinks back to those suits being assembled layer by layer inside of each other like Russian dolls, he sees a bigger metaphor at play. The objects themselves that they were making were very much hybrid physical objects combining soft and hard materials, screws and stitches, and lots of different ways of assembling things all in one object. So you can really even read the teamwork in the object itself. That is the seamstresses, the technicians, the engineers. It was really an organizational victory as much as a physical victory. How to create the organization and the

systems that could allow this very different kind of manufacturing and making process to exist within this ocean of paperwork, which were a necessary part of the larger organizational process, but which didn't suit, in every sense, the making of spacesuits. And when it comes to actually making those spacesuits, the process went something like this. It started with the astronauts themselves being carefully measured. Then patterns for all the different sections of the suits were created and cut out of the various fabrics by engineers.

That's when it was all passed over to the seamstresses to sew together. Then each section would be x-rayed to look for any stray needles or pinpricks. The suits would then be tested by the astronauts, checking fit and functionality. If the suit passed all these levels, the work wasn't over yet. Each suit needed to be copied a few times over for stress tests and as backups. What they were making is often called a moon suit, but really it's like a self-contained spaceship because it will be the only thing protecting the astronauts. It has to shield them from the cold and the elements. It has to regulate their temperature. It has to provide air to breathe. And on top of everything else, it needs to be flexible

to allow for free and easy movement. As Jean says, when you put it on, it's holding you, but at the same time you can move. Well, that's what was important for the astronauts, for their suits, for them to be able to maneuver around, to bend and move and pick up and squat and turn and do what they had to do. Joanne gives us a detailed look at a piece of the suit she worked on, the gloves, which it turns out was one of the hardest parts to build. They have to be so flexible with so many curves and contours and yet be as protective and functional as any other part of the suit. And so these molds,

molds that they made right off the astronaut's hands, were used for making what the glove, the rubber glove part was called the bladder because it held air. It had a piece of coated fabric on the palm side and a piece of just nylon on the backside. And the webbing went around the back of the hand and had Velcro on it where the astronaut could tighten it up on his palm.

And that way, when the glove was inflated, he would be able to flex his fingers and thumb and hold something in his hand. It's amazing to remember that at that time, these folks were pioneers. No one had ever done this before. There was no roadmap, no previous generation of Moonsuit to base your work on. But as the team gets deeper and deeper into the production process, they never lose sight of what this was all about. The astronauts.

Nicholas points to a simple tactic that ensures they remain focused on the right priorities. They put a picture of each astronaut who was going to wear the suit on top of the suit as it was stored and in the production process. So you could remember that this piece of clothing was going to keep someone alive a quarter million miles away from the Earth. In other words, following procedure perfectly was not the mark of a job well done. Success was ensuring that every astronaut could survive on the moon. That was priority number one. I call this superpower primary focus. And even better than the astronauts' photos above

each moon suit for maintaining primary focus was actually meeting them. Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin made numerous trips to be fitted. As Jean remembers, they were like little kids at Christmas time. They were just so excited and happy because they wanted to be astronauts. They became astronauts. And then to actually be to the point of putting on a suit

they were going to be wearing in space and it to fit so nice and feel good, they were excited and happy. It's like a bride, a young lady getting ready to get married and she has to be fitted for a wedding gown. It's the same thing, a young lady getting ready to get married, and she has to be fitted for a wedding gown. It's the same thing. Yeah, pretty much the same thing. Bill points out that when the astronauts visited, they did more than just get fitted. They tried to allow enough time in their

schedule to go see the ladies down on the floor where the sewing was being done, because of course it was in their interest to let them see the face of the person that's going to be wearing the suit that they've made and to thank them for what they did because they knew that they put a lot of hours and a lot of work into these suits. Engineer Homer Ream explains how it would happen. We would have an all-hands assembly down in the production area, which was the biggest room in our plant. And all the production people and all the employees and the crewmen would come in there and speak to them and give them a pep talk and tell them how important everything they were doing was to this program and to their well-being and to basically their life depended on the work being done by IOC. And boy, that was really a morale builder for all the people.

And in case we lose sight of the bigger picture, just why were they rushing to the moon? Homer Ream reminds us of the moment in September 1962 that started it all. President Kennedy made that speech where he committed the United States to beat the Russians to the moon in a decade. His speech became the rallying cry for everybody. Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said because it is there. Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it. And the moon and the planets are there. And new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. Working as a group, one had to help the other. One had to work along with the other.

So it was like we were all linked. Our arms and hands were grasping hands and linking our arms together all as a big chain. And it all worked and came together. And as a team, I couldn't ask for a better team than the team we had that put those suits together. It meant a lot. Homer, from the point of view of the engineers, feels the same way. Everybody that worked on the project were pulling together. Everybody was wanting the task to be done right and thorough and successful.

And if it didn't happen, there was no finger-pointing from the stitcher, the inspector, the pattern makers. Everybody was dedicated on realizing that this suit had to be the best it could be. It would go to the moon. Despite the team's spirit and the years of careful, meticulous work and testing, there is one major worry at this late stage of the project, points out engineer Homer Ream. We couldn't test the suit to the lunar environment exactly simultaneously because there was no way to do that.

There was no lunar simulator. The team had tested the suits in every way they could, subjecting the fabrics to simulations of solar wind and moon dust, bouncing the suits around in high Gs on airplanes, even putting the suits in vacuum chambers. But it's possible that the data NASA had about conditions on the moon wasn't quite right. Or there was some other surprise waiting for them up there. No one will know until they

step onto the moon. By then, of course, it will be too late to fix anything. Apollo 11, unfortunately, became the system's test of the spacesuit. Typically in the town of Dover, Delaware, the middle of the night is silent and dark. But in the early hours of July 21st, 1969, hazy blue lights flicker in living rooms across the county as they do around the world. My four-year-old daughter was there. I woke her up and we watched on the TV. I just had a little black and white one. We didn't have very good reception, but we did see it. And I told her, I said, I'm going was, like millions and millions of other people were doing. And when I saw Neil Armstrong, when he landed on the moon and he came out and was on the moon itself, it was just unbelievable. When I saw him on the moon, it was hard for me to put together the thought that those little parts I worked on, the production floor are now on the moon and it was just something that gave you goosebumps.

And I can remember yelling and screaming at the television. Of course they couldn't hear me on the television. But I was the fact I made that scene, I made that scene. That's all I kept saying. I made that scene. I can't believe I made that C, you know. And it was a good feeling. But the women weren't just feeling excited. I was afraid when they were doing the different things with their hands. And I was hoping there would be no problem, that there was no failure in the glove part. Because that would have really been hard to accept that maybe something I did was not holding up and it was the cause of the whole program failing and maybe a man even possibly losing his life up there.

Homer Ream felt the same way. I was not relaxed because I wanted to see that the systems test had no surprises in it. As the mission went on and things were working just exactly as planned, and I could see that we had everything under control, I started to loosen up a little bit. But just when Homer is starting to relax, Buzz Aldrin does something that gets his heart rate up again. And there Buzz goes, oh, I thought I saw something. He used this scientific geophysical name for some rock. And he goes, boning off camera, look at this rock. And I'm thinking, get that silly sucker back up the ladder. The mission is a success. Why should we mess with success? It was a success, of course.

The astronauts all made it home safe and sound, as did the 10 other astronauts who use the ILC moon suits to walk on the moon over the next three years. It's been over 50 years since the moon landing, but ILC is still around, still making suits for NASA. In fact, their recent spacesuits and prototypes influenced the XEMU, a spacesuit debuted late last year that will be worn by the first woman on the moon, hopefully in a few years. Janet Furl is a design engineering manager at ILC Dover.

She's worked with many of those folks who built the first moon suits, including Joanne and Jean. I learned from them how to make sewing work for life-critical applications. And that knowledge helped us design and make the enhancements to the suit that went on to become the suit that's used today. Janet didn't only learn about making moon suits from that original team. One of the other things I learned from the Apollo astronauts and seamstresses was really the dedication to the job and to the mission because we are making life-critical spacesuit components. There's just a pride in what we do and a sense of responsibility

in what we're producing and what we're approving for use. And there's one last thought I want to leave you with. Picture the moon landing. Picture Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin standing and walking on the moon. Only thing is, we're not actually seeing Armstrong and Aldrin. We're seeing the suits. In every image we've ever seen of the moon, we're seeing the work of Jean and Roberta and Joanne and so many others. That a bunch of women can accomplish something so important,

we were able to put together, make what men dreamed up, and we put it together. There were some women who dedicated day after day and left their families and went to work just as hard as the men did, and look what we produced. We made it possible for the man to go on the moon. The ILC Dover team used key strategies like harnessing divergent expertise and never losing sight of their goal to build those first moon suits. You can find out more about those and

lots of other superpowers at atlassian.com slash teamistry. Please let us know what you think of the show. You can give us a rating in your podcast app, or better yet, leave us a review. We read each and every one. And the we, by the way, the team that brings you Teamistry is writer and producer Pedro Mendez, story producer and researcher Ramatula Shaikh, executive producer Karen Burgess, sound designers Sean Cole and Christian Proem. From Atlassian, we have Christine De La Rosa, John Ville, Jamie Austin, and Christian Proem. From Atlassian, we have Christine De La Rosa, John Ville, Jamie Austin, and Megan Rowe. Thanks for watching!