Chapter 28: ►

_Wilting Straws in Plaster of Paris_

The impasse in the perfection of the full-pressure suit was primarily in the restraining material or “tire” which holds the inflatable rubber “inner tube” against the pilot’s skin. Many materials were tested to keep the ballooning inner tube in place against the skin, but each was so heavy and rigid that when the suit was in operation, the pilot was trapped in a bulbous vise, unable to move his arms, legs, or head. The suit engineers tried to offset this by hinging the elbow, neck, wrist, and knee joints with bellows and bearings. But the end result was a complicated, mechanical monster, obviously unsatisfactory for a pilot working within the tight confines of an airplane cockpit, and quite marginal if escape from the aircraft became necessary.

David Clark’s suit number seven, which I had first tested in the altitude chamber in Philadelphia in 1951, was an attempt to get away from the “stiff” suit concept. It was a step in the right direction but a long way from an operationally sound item. But if enough time and effort are devoted to any technical problem, the solution will come eventually. Obsessed with this new challenge, David Clark kept plugging away, with Air Force support, and in time came up with the answer.

He revealed it to me one day in his factory, not long after we completed the X-15 mock-up inspection. After a tour of his fascinating plant we went to his private office. I could tell that he was bursting with pride.

“Scotty,” he said, “did you ever see one of those ‘Chinese fingers’ made of straw? You know, those things you put your index finger in? You try to pull your finger out and the straw grips it even tighter?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “I used to play with those when I was a kid.”

“Well, take a look at this. I made this on an airplane when I was going up to Alaska last month to see my daughter.” He passed me a sample of hand-woven material which looked not like a Chinese finger but something like an Anchor Fence, except that it was made of nylon thread. I gave it a good pull and right off I saw what he was driving at.

“We call this ‘link-net’ material in the trade,” Clark said. “I think it’s the answer to the pressure-suit restraining cloth. It will work just like the Chinese finger. If you bend your arm, the material on top will contract and the material on the bottom will stretch. It also twists easily from side to side under stress. At all times you will have an even pressure on the rubber bladders. It’s as flexible as cotton cloth, strong as steel, and weighs little or nothing. I think that with this material and the new regulators and other improvements we can give you a complete full-pressure suit with a total weight of thirty-five pounds.”

“What?” I was astonished. At best, present equipment for the job added up to as much as 110 pounds, give or take a few.

“Yes, thirty-five. Now it’s going to take a little time because we have to make this stuff by hand. But maybe we can come up with a machine to weave it.”

Our long-standing faith in David Clark had paid off. The link-net material proved to be the great “break-through” in the full-pressure suit game. It relegated all the stiff suits to the junk-heap. The restraining material was as flexible as a suit of long-johns and almost as comfortable. It eliminated the need for bellows-joints at the knees and elbows and for bearings at the shoulders and wrists.

As I was leaving the factory we passed through the Research Department. Amid the great humming looms and rattling sewing machines, I spotted a piece of shiny cloth lying on a long table. The material looked somewhat like silver lamé. I went over and picked it up.

“What is this?” I asked Clark.

“That’s a piece of nylon with a vacuum-blasted aluminum coating. Just something one of the boys was trying out.”

“Pretty glamorous looking.”

Then a light went on in the back of my mind. “Say, Dave, why don’t you make the outer cover of the pressure suit out of this material, in place of that awful-looking khaki coverall?”

“Whatever for?”

“You remember that time down at Philadelphia when they took that picture for the magazine cover? We don’t want to make that mistake again. A coverall of this material would look real good, like a space suit should--photogenic. To justify it technically we can tell them this silver material is specially designed to radiate heat or something.”

“A marvelous idea, Scotty. I’ll make the boots and gloves out of black material for contrast.”

“Great touch,” I said. Ever since then all pressure suits have been silver.

* * * * *

I made my way to New York City. To save his fitters expensive, time-consuming cross-country trips each time they modified or improved the new suit, Clark suggested that we mold a “statue” of me just as I would sit in the cockpit of the X-15. I bought the idea without a second thought. How I lived to regret it! Believe me, no one can claim to have lived the full life until he has been cast in plaster of Paris.

The appointment Dave Clark arranged in New York took me to a ratty building on 42nd Street just off Broadway. John Flagg, now a vice president of the Clark Company, met me, and together we took a squeaky elevator to the studio of a theatrical sculptor. He specialized in devices for stage sets, armor suits, horribly distorted masks, and the like. The proprietor, a tall, balding man with a walrus mustache, was a “mad artist,” a Romanian whose name I have forgotten. He had an assistant, just off the boat and unable to speak English. The studio turned out to be a cluttered, unheated attic. It was mid-winter.

“Very well,” the artist said, rubbing his hands from the cold, or the unexpected windfall, or the artistic challenge standing before him, I’m not sure which. “We’ll make a plaster of Paris mold in two parts, the body and the head. Later we will cast the statue in this mold. Now first you must strip down completely and shave all the hair off your body except your head.”

“_All_ the hair off my body?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” the artist replied. “_All_ of it. Otherwise, it will stick in the plaster of Paris.”

“I don’t have a razor,” I said feebly, eyeing the nearest exit.

“Never mind, Scotty, I’ll go get one,” John Flagg said, chuckling. He ran down the stairway and in a few minutes was back with a small electric razor, the size used by ladies.

“I don’t know how in hell I’ll ever explain this on my expense account,” he said, “but here it is.”

I stripped, put on an athletic supporter, and shaved the exposed portions of my body. After applying a thick coating of vaseline to my skin, I sat down on a rickety chair, feeling like a half-frozen Greek god. The mad artist prepared the plaster of Paris mixture, screaming in Romanian and gesticulating wildly at his assistant, pausing at his work only to stand back to size up his victim. I noted with dismay the ripples on my stomach in a sitting position. I would be cast forever with a row of rubber tires on my waist!

The artists erected a mold about my body and then, without warning, began slapping on the frigid plaster of Paris. At the beginning it felt like being immersed in ice water, but as time passed my sealed-off body heat began to build up, and for the first time since I entered the attic I was warm. But soon I was too hot, sweating and breathing heavily under the increasing load of plaster.

The artists erected a cage of steel within the plaster to hold it together. Then they turned me upside down in the chair and did the other side. I waited in stolid agony for the plaster to harden, afraid to move a muscle lest the mold be ruined and the process repeated.

“Now we must do the head,” the artist said. “This is the most difficult part. You’re not subject to claustrophobia, are you? Do you prefer to breathe through your nose or mouth?”

“Mouth,” I said. “No, I don’t have claustrophobia.”

The creation of the head mold was slightly different but no less taxing. First they covered me with a kind of rubbery moulage, and after putting two paper straws in my mouth so I could breathe, they then applied the plaster. After a few minutes the straws wilted and I could barely suck in enough air for survival. I couldn’t swallow because the movement of my Adam’s apple would destroy their work. With my head rigidly set in the heavy mold, I listened as the artists babbled. Their voices seemed to come from far away, from some deep cave. They watched me closely. With their heads so encased, some people become overwhelmed by claustrophobia and come up fighting--ripping at the mask.

John Flagg was doubled up on the floor with laughter.

Before applying the plaster over the rubbery moulage, the two artists had laid a string across my head from shoulder to shoulder. The idea was that when the mold hardened it could be cut in two and thus removed by pulling the string, something like opening a package of chewing gum or cigarettes.

Now a great debate arose between the two artists about when to pull the string. Actually, this _is_ a matter for careful consideration because the string must be pulled at exactly the right time. If it is pulled too soon, before the plaster has hardened enough, the whole thing crumbles, or the seam rejoins. If it is pulled too late, after the plaster becomes hard and brittle, the mask must be chiseled off and the process begun all over again.

In the midst of the debate, the head artist remembered he had to make an urgent telephone call. He disappeared from the room, leaving his assistant to watch over the victim. It was clear from muffled conversation that the assistant was very concerned. He touched the plaster repeatedly, testing its hardness, shook his head glumly and paced the floor, obviously as torn by indecision as Hamlet. Finally, he could stand it no longer. He rushed over and pulled the string.

A few moments later the chief artist returned and smilingly said: “Well, now, it is time to pull the string.” Then with a look of horror he saw that he had been beaten to the punch. He exploded and turned on the assistant in fury, babbling in Romanian, English, and, I think, six other languages.

“I’ll fire you--you don’t know anything about this work--I’ll have your visa revoked--you’ll go home on the next boat--” And so on.

The mold held together, after all. It was finally removed and I could breathe again. I tried to wash the vaseline coating from my body with cold water, and then I got out of there as fast as I could.

As it turned out, the crazy artist made a fairly creditable statue from the mold and my rubber tires were immortally preserved. Clark used the statue to make number one and number two X-15 pressure suits. As far as the fit was concerned, they were perfect as long as I didn’t gain a pound.

* * * * *

After that I spent the equivalent of years of flying in the Air Force’s altitude and test chambers at Wright Field testing the Clark pressure suits. The Air Force people--notably the Command Flight Surgeon of the Air Research and Development Command, Brigadier General Don Flickinger--displayed keen interest in the work and their support was unlimited. We wrung out the suits, not only in repeated “trips” to 150,000 feet altitude, but also in ovens and refrigerators, to make sure they, to say nothing of the pilot, could stand up under extremes of temperature.

These prolonged tests became somewhat of a minor physical challenge for me. The aero-medical officers at Wright Field submitted, half jokingly, that considering my age (I was then 36) my body would never take the beating. When they matched my performance against the data accumulated on human guinea pigs over several years, my record defied their statistics.

“You’re a physical freak,” someone remarked. “No one can take that kind of punishment. How do you do it?”

It seemed superfluous to point out that for centuries man has been outperforming and outliving the statistics of the physicians, and that, as I have said before, if the spirit is willing the flesh can exceed all probable limits. History is full of such accounts. Teddy Roosevelt is a good example.

* * * * *

The sled track at Edwards was the brain-child of Air Force Colonel John Paul Stapp, an aero-medical officer who specialized in the physiological effects of high-speed and high-altitude bail out and severe G forces. The track was a mile long. The sled was powered by a cluster of solid-propellant rockets. When touched off, the sled accelerated with great speed. It roared down the track for a few seconds and then splashed into a pool of water. The water stopped the sled, subjecting it to tremendous G. On the front of the sled we mounted a dummy nose of the X-15, complete with cockpit canopy, ejection seat, and a plastic anthropomorphic form in the seat dressed in a Clark pressure suit.

We gathered behind a concrete shield listening as the countdown was intoned on the loudspeaker: “5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Zero!”

The powerful rockets on the rear of the sled exploded to life. Within a few seconds the big sled was hurtling down the track at 1000 miles an hour, almost faster than the eye could follow. Cameras, mounted in a half-dozen positions, recorded the motion of the sled and the X-15 nose. Sensitive instruments on the seat and inside the plastic dummy telemetered back a constant stream of data. These data would tell us the total effect of wind-blast and heat on the dummy and pressure suit. It would settle once and for all the controversy of the X-15 ejection-seat principle.

At the peak of acceleration of the sled--1000 miles an hour--the X-15 seat fired automatically. The V-shaped canopy blew off. The seat, with the dummy firmly restrained, rose from the sled and zoomed skyward. Over one hundred feet in the air the dummy separated from the seat and a parachute automatically deployed, lowering the pressure-suit-clad dummy to the desert floor. The parachute was a lightweight model with a twenty-four-foot canopy, built and tested especially for the X-15.

The test was successful. To make certain we were right, we ran the sled several more times. All the data indicated the X-15 pilot, protected by a Clark full-pressure suit, could eject under the most severe conditions we could anticipate without bodily injury beyond the usual bruises associated with an escape from a disabled airplane.

* * * * *

“Charlie,” I said, pulling a chair alongside Feltz’s desk. “Here is the final word on the suit as we see it.” I laid out a series of reports and schematic drawings.

“The basic deal is this: the first layer is winter underwear, the second a ventilation garment to cool the pilot. The third layer is the rubberized airtight pressure garment with the anti-G bladders. The fourth layer is this new link-net material for strength. The outer layer is this silver lamé material, mainly for photo appeal.

“We have run the suit through heat and cold tests. It will withstand anything we can expect to meet. The suit itself, during X-15 flight, will be cooled by nitrogen gas from the same tank we use to pressurize the X-15 cockpit; you’ll hardly be able to measure the quantity. Here’s the way we have the oxygen regulators and supply set up. During ride to launch point the pilot in the suit breathes oxygen from a supply from the mother plane. When he’s ready to launch, he can turn a valve and get oxygen from a supply in the X-15. This will save us some oxygen weight. The suit itself contains a bottle of oxygen, enough to get him down on the ground, which automatically pressurizes the suit and helmet in case of ejection. Incidentally, we’ve got a rubber seal in the helmet just above the pilot’s mouth and nose to prevent fogging the helmet lens. No electrical heating required.

“We worked it so that the parachute harness also serves as the seat-restraint straps. No need for extra shoulder straps and a lap belt. This will save us a few pounds. The sled tests show that the manacles will hold the pilot’s feet in place, and that the blast on ejection is far from fatal. The seat weather-vanes, as expected. The pilot will pull some G’s going out, but not enough to black him out. Now, to top it all off, I’m giving you the whole pressure suit for thirty-nine pounds. You could walk around in it on the moon.”

“Dad-gummed,” Feltz said. “This sounds too good to be true. Where’s the hooker?”

“The only problem is this. We’re still ironing out some improvements. We can’t go much faster than we’re going. I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to wind up. We will be flight-testing the new pressure suit and the X-15 all at the same time.”

“You won’t be able to flight-test the suit before then?”

“No,” I said. “We’ll have a lot of chamber time, but no realistic in-flight operations.”

“Well, that’s the breaks,” Feltz said. “Just make darned sure the thing works.”