Gallery: What to Wear Into the Hostile Realms of Space

While primitive suits inspired by Post’s were investigated by the armed forces after World War II, more synthetic notions of man in space gained credence. Notable was the neologism “cyborg,” a man-machine hybrid proposed by Nathan Kline and Manfred Clynes. Clynes, a mathematician and analog computer expert, and Kline, a psychopharmacologist, proposed that instead of carrying an earthlike environment with him, the biochemistry and homeostatic functioning of man should itself be adapted for space travel. Grounded in the same theories of cybernetic control that shaped parallel advances in systems management, the cyborg concept for space exploration was studied intensively before its eventual abandonment in 1966.