McDougle: First meeting with Mae was her fit check, because they all have to come and get fit checks first so we’ll know what size equipment they’ll need, everything from their diaper size to their harness size. We receive general information that says they wear size nine or whatever, but we still need to measure them for our specific gear. Helmet is one size—no sizing with the helmet, just for helmet pads. Boots are easy. The boots are usually a size and a half bigger because they wear thick socks and the bootie part of the suit that takes up more room.
McDougle: There’s anthropometric measurements. You perform all the measuring—just like if you get an outfit tailor-made, same thing. The trunk, around the waist, the girth, up the back, everywhere. You measure everything, because you need to get as good a fit as possible for the crew member. With the suit you can adjust the arm length, the leg length, the waist and the girth.Sometimes crew members wear somebody else’s harness. We have a few crew members that have to get special harnesses made, because nobody’s harness would fit them, even though you’d think you’d be able to have small, medium, large. The harnesses are actually serialized with the crew member’s name, but you do have other crew members that can fit another crew member’s harness so you won’t have to make one for everybody. The suits are usually small, medium, large. You have small and short, medium and long, large long, extra large long and so on; it’s not like size eight and ten. The gloves are from A through L, with some customs.
McDougle: The suits weren’t made for women. Even a small woman can have hips so it can make you wear a larger size suit. The breasts can make a difference sometimes. It’s usually the hips and butt area for women. It can be a little harder to zip down, because it’s made for men.A female ACES [advanced crew escape suits] was made later. They actually went to the company that makes the suit and got measured to make a suit for the smaller female astronauts, for a better fit. The suit, mind you, is not made to be formfitting at all. When you see them in it, it looks frumpy, but it’s usually the hip area that’s an issue for women.It might be a little snug there, but you can still get it zipped because it’s a very heavy-duty zipper. It’s not like a jeans zipper. When I assisted anyone and their suit was a little snug in the rear I’d have them tilt forward a little bit as I zipped.
Ross-Nazzal: Suck in.
McDougle: Yes, same thing, but it was because of her hips. She’s tiny. She was so tiny right here, [demonstrates] and she just had her hips and her bottom. You just have to zip it down, work with it. Just have her bend forward. And that comes with experience and working with different people. I have worked with small astronauts and tall astronauts, so it just depends. Of course some people fill them out more, but that was the only issue I had. It wasn’t a big deal though. The suit would still function properly; do what it’s supposed to do if they lost cabin pressure. She never complained to me that I can recall. I have no idea what they had to do down in the EMU [extravehicular mobility unit] world because I only work with the ACES, the launch/entry suit. And she didn’t do spacewalks, so she didn’t have to wear the EMU.
McDougle: They get the fit check of course first. Sometimes if they got delayed or scrubbed for too long—like STS-114 [return to flight after the STS-107 Columbia accident] took forever—they’d have to come back in and get fit checks again. Maybe they’d gained weight or lost weight because it’d been such a long time. Now if it’s just been a little while, a few months, then we usually won’t have to refit them, but we have had instances where somebody did. They may have worked out and put on more muscle, had some body changes.
You may have to change a harness size or make other adjustments. We have final fit checks two days before actual launch, and we’ve actually had changes up to that point. And you just want to say, “You’ve been wearing that all this time, and now you tell us?” but we have to be prepared for that. We take spare equipment down.They have about 22 to 24 training events if I remember right. Things like ascent simulation, they go to the simulators over in Building 5. Building 5 has the motion base and the fixed base simulators. In Building 9 there’s the crew compartment trainers and the full fuselage trainer. They can tilt up vertical like launch or stay .
he motion base simulator they can actually simulate flying and having issues. Sometimes the mission control folks over there throw problems at them, and they have to practice what they would do in that scenario and practice landing. They practice landing and flying in the Shuttle training aircraft also. Depending on if they’re landing at night or day, that’s when they’d usually practice. If they’re having a night or early morning landing when it’s dark, they’ll practice at night.
They do some fully suited; they do some in just a flight suit. Of course they want to practice in a suit at least once because they want it to be realistic practicing their Shuttle landing. The commander and pilot do that, and the suit techs are there to suit them up and strap them also have bailouts. They have the one over at the pool [Neutral Buoyancy Lab], which is probably the most realistic, the closest to setup for flight because we have to actually have everything working. They have to inflate their life preserver units, actually activate their oxygen bottles, the whole nine yards. But it’s breathing air, not oxygen when they’re practicing. They hoist them up, they drop them into the water, and then they practice going under the parachute and get into their life raft.
That’s one of the most intensive training events they perform.The other ones are normal. They’ll do the post insertion operations. “We just got into space, so we have to doff everything, bag it up, and put it where it would go.” They do all these events before they go. Sometimes they’ll do one or two between TCDT and launch. It depends. Sometimes the commander may want to practice one more time because they want a refresher. It’s up to them if they want to do it more than once. Sometimes they say, “You know what? All these guys are experienced.
We don’t need to do that particular training because we all know that.” Sometimes you’ll have a new crew member that’ll do it by themselves first, and then do it with the crew because they want to make sure they know what they’re doing, it just depends. So we have to do all suited training with the crew.Wherever they go, if they’re getting into a suit, our team has to be there.
Of course they can suit themselves up, because they have to do it in space. But it’s less pressure, less stressful for them, to have to deal with that—and less damage to our gear—if we help them while they’re here on the ground. The EMU suit labs have a training lab and a flight lab. They don’t train in a Class 1. Whereas CEE utilizes Class I and III for training. The crew may use some of their Class 1 gear that’s actually going to fly in space to train in, so we have to perform very thorough inspection tests. It’s called PIA (Preinstallation acceptance) when we inspect and test everything to get ready for launch.
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