Adam Savage’s Apollo A7L Spacesuit Replica!
Adam gives a tour of his Apollo A7L spacesuit replica, made by industrious suit builder Ryan Nagata. The attention to detail and fabrication techniques make this suit one of Adam’s favorites in his collection. You may have seen Adam wear this spacesuit in the final season of Mythbusters!
Shot and edited by Joey Fameli
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In regard to the flashlight…Why did Nasa develop and tool a custom flashlight?
In regard to comments…Where is the best place to leave comments so they get read by Tested nowadays? Here or Youtube? I watch my Tested videos in the youtube feed, but find myself coming back here to leave a comment…is that the best practice?
not sure, but some ideas. brass is naturally resistant to corrosion and wear (like galling), and temperature fluctuations. there may have been concerns with the bulb, glass/lens, or fittings, due to radiation or being in a vacuum. or possibly that a lot off the shelf flashlights would offgas or contain chemicals you wouldn’t want in a controlled environment.
yep!
Needs a back flap
This is a gorgeous suit. Thank you for sharing it properly with us.
How much of the suit’s plans are easily found in the public domain? Like for fabric patterns, dimensions and drawings for the metal parts and fittings.
Heh, the comments here are typically far more sane, reasonable, and even helpful over there than on youtube!
I read much of the commentary on Tested. To maintain my sanity, I never EVER look at the comments on YouTube.
I don’t know about the Apollo stuff. But when I worked on the EMU (which isn’t that much newer, but is still in use), it was still classified as military equipment by the state department. We had to closely manage drawings and limit access to hardware. I assume the situation has not changed in the 4 years I’ve been out of the biz.
About 13 years or so I had a chance to interview with Air-Lock inc, who makes those fittings for real. I had a chance to see the Apollo fittings close up(they were in a case in the lobby) and from what I can tell from the video, Mr. Nagata did an excellent job of getting them right. They even look like anodized Aluminum. I did a blog post with more space suit stuff than I should have last year and I thought that I would share. It looks like there are 40 or so links to space suit sites.
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/space-suit-space-suit-and-more-space-suits/#more-10315
I also started a Pinterest board of space suit pics for future reference.
https://www.pinterest.com/jclydecarlton/space-suit/
I would assume recent stuff would be.What did you do on the EMU? That’s awesome!
But being you can get the entire Apollo guidance computer’s code now from GitHub, I’d expect a bunch of stuff from that era to just be out there. Not that I have an interest in replicating any of the stuff, just curious is all.
That’s some awesome stuff on 1 page jc! Thanks for sharing.
I wonder if Adam ever plans to remake some of those resin cast parts in actual aluminum? I donno how far his completionist mentality runs to where he’s satisfied with only metal looking plastic parts. I’d personally want them to be metal.
What did Ryan Nagata use for the suit fabric?
Adam’s suit is made of 420D nylon pack cloth. It looks quite a bit like certain weaves of beta cloth and it’s pretty inexpensive. I’ve made these suits out of different materials though (I have a large roll of actual beta cloth in my shop to eventually make my own suit).
There’s a lot of information online, including NASA parts breakdowns and diagrams. But no actual blueprints, patterns or schematics as far as I know, certainly not for every component.
I’m working on anodized aluminum parts. I’ll hopefully upgrade Adam’s suit later this year.
Is the Martian space suit ever going to continue or has that officially been scraped?
When Adam did his most recent Reddit AMA a few weeks ago the question came up and he said it “was moving slowly” or something like that, but definitely not scrapped. I imagine it is tough to make progress when Adam is in SF and always on the move (now he is back on tour soon as well) and Frank is in LA and also super busy with the day-job.
– thanks for the info on the fabric. The suit looks great! Any chance you and Adam can do a raygun one-day build sometime for Tested?
I was based at the big training pool in Houston and mostly worked on suits used during training events. The suit parts are the same as flight hardware, but we use ground-based systems for the life support functions. The bulk of my experience is actually with the tools used by astronauts on spacewalks. For both the suits and tools, it was a lot of sustaining engineering type stuff – keeping a fleet of aging hardware going while using it in an environment it was never intended for. Fun and fascinating stuff.
I’m completely unfamiliar with suits prior to the EMU, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of the legacy suit technology is still in use – or at least variations on old themes. When it comes to life-support hardware, NASA typically prefers ‘old and reliable’ over ‘new and shiny’..
Adam certainly answered my watch question from a while back. authenticity be damned, I’m happy he went for an obvious replica, rather than one that’s too good.
There’s a famous picture of Buzz Aldrin with that long velcro watch strap doubled up on his bare wrist. There are a few sources for actual period-correct NASA velcro straps out there, and I’ve thought about buying a long one and doing the double-up. I’ve also thought about the ridicule I would receive from my wife for doing so…