- A spacesuit has to do three things.
It has to maintain pressure
so your blood doesn't start boiling in the vacuum of space.
It has to provide oxygen so you can breathe.
And it has to protect against the environment:
extreme heat, extreme cold, and direct sunlight.
This...
...won't do any of those. It's just a replica of that one.
That's the actual Sokol spacesuit
that Tim Peake, the most recent British astronaut, used in space.
The folks here at the National Space Centre
wouldn't let me try on a real one, which is fair enough.
Versions of that suit have been protecting astronauts since the 1970s.
And there are variants still used today.
It's not designed for hours-long space walks.
It's basically an emergency personal lifeboat
for if the ship you're travelling on... uh, springs a leak.
And it provides those three things:
pressure, oxygen, environmental protection.
Now a couple of months ago, I had a video where an AI
tried to suggest stories and titles that I could cover.
And one of the things it came up with
was "the long-forgotten history of the British moon landings".
Not strictly true, of course. We never actually got there.
But one of the team here got in touch,
and it turns out that in the 1940s,
15 years before Kennedy said that America "chose to go to the moon",
the British Interplanetary Society did have similar plans,
including our own spacesuit.
- The BIS was set up in 1933 by a man called Phil Cleator.
And he had this plan.
He wanted to get together with like-minded individuals
who were interested in space flight,
and what the possible future of space flight might be.
Rocket technology was suddenly moving forward in a way
that, actually, spaceflight was something tangible
and might well be realistic.
- The BIS weren't seriously expecting
to launch a mission to the moon on their own.
But they did want to say,
"Hey, we think this is possible. And we think Britain should do it."
And one of their number, illustrator Ralph Smith,
drew up plans for a spacesuit.
- So we have an exhibition here at the National Space Centre
that focuses on the space race.
And people tend to think about America and the Soviet Union.
And we wanted to tell something
of what Britain was up to at the same time.
As we were planning for our exhibition,
we were leafing through a research document
and looking at the history of the BIS.
And immediately this picture jumped out
of somebody wearing this incredible- looking spacesuit that they'd designed.
And immediately we just said, "We have to make this."
- It looks wonderful, but no one ever built it...
until a few years ago.
- So, I get a call, and where do you start?
You've got two drawings basically. Rather than just say,
"Well, I'll make a replica, a facsimile of it."
I thought "Let's look at the materials that were available at the time."
Cotton and rubber, much like a modern space suit
is made out of beta fabric and a rubber pressure layer inside.
And the pressure's inside it.
It can't expand out any further. It can't balloon out.
He would have an oxygen supply in his backpack there.
So he's being fed this oxygen supply
going through, past his face, down through the suit,
and recycling back into the backpack again
for expulsion in the way just like an Apollo suit did.
Here you've got what we call the "convolutes".
And they're to give a bit of movement at the arm.
And right up here, you've got cloth of silver.
If he's getting cold on the surface of the moon,
he can then pull this cape around him.
And now any heat that's radiating out from the suit,
he can then trap that heat in.
And it reflects the heat back into the body again.
So these little pins here, they are, in fact
little stand-off mushrooms.
So when the cape is hanging over them,
there's a gap between the surface of the suit
and the surfaces of the cape.
And that gap of vacuum
means there's no physical thermal transfer from the suit
out into the vacuum of space.
You'll have noticed that on the front of his chest,
he's got this rather strange device here.
This is an airlock.
Imagine the circumstances. You're on the surface of the moon.
You find an interesting rock. You open the airlock.
You put the rock into the air lock. You close the airlock.
Now you withdraw your arms inside the suit
through these exceptionally large holes here.
And using that long front, you can examine that rock
that you've just taken off the lunar surface.
But you also notice, there is a shooting stick.
And it gives you a walking stick-cum-seat.
You get tired on the surface of the moon.
You open the seat part of the shooting stick and you sit down.
They've kind of thought of everything, really.
So how do you build something like this and stay to those 1940s techniques?
We turned to what would have been available at the time,
even to this silver finish here on the helmet.
And in fact, the people we went to to get this vacuum plating done,
they were the original company
that would have been doing the original if it had ever happened.
And in fact, when we took the helmet into them,
they said, "Oh, well, we finally got to do it then."
- There's newsreel footage from the 1940s
which says the BIS estimated half a million pounds
to send someone to the moon.
In today's money, that's about 20 million.
The Apollo program roughly cost the US government 10,000 times that.
It's safe to say that the BIS's plans were optimistic.
So how well would the British spacesuit have held up
against an actual trip to the moon?
- We're pretty sure this would be the Mark 1.
If this had ever really walked on the moon,
this would have been the Mark 8, the Mark 9.
Remember on the moon, you only have to pressurise up,
if you're breathing pure oxygen, to about 4½ pounds per square inch.
This easily would have been capable of taking that pressure,
but it just would have been pretty immobile.
You simply can't lift your arms up very high.
Because of the nature of this deep shoulder
means that the arm just can't rise up.
- I think the BIS were very serious about going to the moon.
They had nowhere near as much information
as NASA would have had in the 1950s and '60s
about the realities of space flight,
and particularly the challenges of getting to the moon.
But certainly these weren't crazy people just throwing around ideas.
There wer lots of really talented people.
They were just nowhere near as complex in terms of the materials that they had,
but they weren't available to them at the time.
So who knows?
Had they have had the time and the money to develop the sort of space-age materials
that went into some of those later suits, more time to practice
and actually do some practical experiments, then who knows?
Quite possibly.
- Thank you so much to everyone at the National Space Centre.
Along with the space suits, they've got rockets and satellites,
and an actual piece of the moon.
You can find out more about them at the link in the description.
I mean, it's probably a good thing
that the real ones are made to measure, 'cause, um...