Touching the Moon

At that time the LEM really seemed to me a 15 tons of scrap metal. Like an impossible machine output from a Jules Verne’s book. With it’s 64 kb computer and 4 kb of ram (much less than the iPhone in my pocket) all this seems so incredible.
But, as we know, it was just the result of a very very long, hard and complicated research where nothing was left to the case. Each study and each experiment was just a mosaic piece required to complete the unique and magnificent enterprise.

The plaster casts of the astronaut’s hands of Apollo 11 mission: Buzz Aldrin (1930), Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) and Michael Collins (1930) in exhibition during the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission at The Apollo Treasure Gallery at the Kennedy Space Centre Visitor Complex, Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The spacesuit maker ILC Industries (now ILC Dover) made the plaster casts of each astronauts hand to create the fit-gloves. The pressure bladder inside the gloves was dip molded from the casts. To keep the right pressure on the rubber hand, the adherence must be perfect. The engineers has made every single glove directly on the plaster cast of each hand.
A-7 Lunar Extravehicular gloves. Outside the protective shell of metal Chromel-R fabric with thermal insulation.


