I first became interested in spacesuit design during my high school’s monthly Physics Journal Club at our nearby university. During my freshman year, my interest in spacesuits grew, and I decided to create a video on the history of NASA spacesuits. I had just bought a book on the NASA spacesuit collection that the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum had on display. It included a variety of American pressure suits from Wiley Post to the Apollo missions to recent EVA suits.

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I was so excited to learn about pressure suits that I researched more on the history of these designs and compiled them into a video. At the time, I didn’t realize that I would go on to work at a spacesuit manufacturing company the very next year! The video was created completely on Microsoft Powerpoint, screen recorded, edited on Adobe Premiere with my voiceover, and then projected as a 3D hologram using a tablet and some clear PVC sheets.

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During my internship at Final Frontier Design, I was commissioned to pattern and construct the pressure suit as well as the outer layer of their prototype EVA suit. The pressure suit (orange under the white) requires soldering strips of coated nylon at the seams to create an airtight system. In the summer, I returned for a commission to weld and create a technical drawing of a Boeing liquid cooling garment (not shown). I enjoyed working at the company so much that I returned to work full time after graduating from Parsons.