Manuel Rodriguez

Rodriguez joined NASA as a systems engineer just after graduating from Texas A&M University. The department itself was still quite young.

His main focus was spacesuits. Figuring out how to integrate pieces manufactured by different companies, designing it to work like the human body and making sure everything was adaptable to the moon’s environment — keeping in mind no one had gone to the moon before and there was limited information about what it was like.

“In studying the moon from Earth through telescopes and such, there were certain things that scientists were able to establish,” Rodriguez said. “We knew for example that it had gravity. 1/6th of our gravity. We knew what the temperatures on the moon were and the daylight and the dark. So that started giving us the parameters for the requirements of what the equipment had to be able to sustain.”

The spacesuit itself is a pressure enclosure, Rodriguez said. But it has to have mobility, so the suit has shoulders, elbows, wrists, joints. It also has to manage heat and maintain a certain pressure.

“Then we had to design the backpack, which provides that environment,” Rodiguez said. “The suit provided all the mechanical needs, and the backpack provides the life-support needs.”

Gloves were the hardest part.

“Take a medical glove, a rubber glove,” he said. “If you blow it up, all the fingers go straight and they’re just straight. So if you make a glove that does that and you pressurize it and your hand goes like that, it’s going to be hard to do the functions.”

That meant designing finger functions and also making sure the palm of the glove wouldn’t blow up too big. They had to design for different hand sizes and accommodate things like thermal insulation. They had to make sure it wouldn’t tear open. It all had to have redundancies built in just in case.

The spacesuit itself has 17 layers, starting with a longjohn-like liquid cooling garment and ending with a white cloth that’s actually glass so it doesn’t burn.

When Armstrong stepped out onto the moon, Rodriguez said he just felt awe.

“It was just a magnificent moment,” he said.