A History Of Spacesuits, In Pictures

Space Race Mars-ready spacesuits, as imagined in 1954. Fred Freeman

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We've been working on fashion for the final frontier since the 19th century, when Jules Verne suggested in Around The Moon that space travel might require some sort of suit, like those worn by divers.

Since then, space travel has gone from science fiction to tweetable real-life experience. With that, our designs for protective gear--both real and imagined--have gone from impractical to immobilizing to workable.

In Spacesuit: A History through Fact and Fiction, Brett Gooden traces the development of astronaut outwear in both fact and fiction from the first hot air balloon flight in the late 1700s to the present. Along the way, you get an inside look at suit innovation during the Cold War space race.

The modern space suit mildly resembles a high-tech snow onesie (eeee), but hey, things could have been worse; early prototypes for lunar suits featured a rigid "canned" design, and others would go skintight in an emergency to try to keep your body parts from boiling.