‘Space blankets’ and women’s labour.

In previous posts, I’ve looked at the material culture and intangible heritage of women on the Moon. I talked about different ways we might make a feminist map of the Moon, how the first bootprints were made by overshoes made by women, and the work of women on the Apollo guidance computer. 

There’s another critical piece of lunar technology that I want to investigate: thermal insulation blankets.

Finding forgotten women in photographs

I wrote a chapter on plastics in space for the Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Plastics (2024). In this chapter I used the development of polyimide films coated in aluminium – the so-called space blanket – as an example of plastic use in spacecraft and space missions. Golden space blankets are used as thermal insulation on many spacecraft, and the Apollo descent modules were wrapped in them, bringing some much-needed shininess to the Moon.

I looked at the history of one of the earliest US spacecraft: the Echo balloons. These were massive inflatable balloons that acted as passive satellites. You bounced radio waves off them and back into the atmosphere to increase the distance they could travel i.e. around the curve of the Earth.

I was reading through the 1960s reports done for NASA on the practical and scientific aspects of these metallic balloons. In one report, I started to notice something in the photographs. Although they were not mentioned in the text, the photographs showed women working on the factory floor, applying aluminium coating to Mylar plastic film to create the balloon material. I was immediately on high alert. 

It’s a well-known phenomenon in the history of women in science that you can often find them in photographs, even if they are not mentioned or named anywhere (I’ll often find them in the footnotes). Many people have done the research to identify these forgotten women and they usually turn out to have an interesting story, or to have made a scientific contribution which received little recognition or documentation. I filed away the fact that women were involved in the manufacture of the prototype for this essential space material. However, it turned out to be more difficult to find out who they were and what they did. 

The birth of the space blanket

I’ve moved on to the Apollo missions because I’m interested to see if there is more to find out about women’s involvement in the material culture – and thus their contribution to the heritage significance – of these sites on the Moon.

The Apollo 11 thermal blankets, on both the descent and ascent modules, were made by DuPont who had introduced the polyimide film Kapton, which turned out to be a much better core material than the Mylar used for Project Echo. The Kapton was aluminised just like the Echo balloons, but with a vapour deposition method rather than adhesive to bond the two materials together. 

I was curious if there were also women on the shop floor at DuPont, working on the Apollo space blankets. This was not as simple as I thought it might be. I looked for reports in the NASA Technical Report Server, but turned nothing up. Then I discovered that the Hagley Museum and Library had a lot of historic DuPont archives, as well as oral histories. I started searching. (Oh my god their archives, I could get lost in there).

There wasn’t much. A female martial arts aficionado appears in this 1969 video, testing the strength of the Kapton for the Apollo 9 mission:

This 1970 film, from the DuPont collection at the Hagley Museum, is the opposite of showing forgotten women working for DuPont! In it, the astronaut is juxtaposed to the housewife. She’s the ideal housewife fictional astronaut Tony Nelson was always trying to make Jeannie be in I Dream of Jeannie. ‘Most materials in this masterpiece of man-made environment for the Moon landing [meaning the spacesuit] have been easing women’s chores for years’ says the narrator. You don’t get to go to the Moon, lady, but hurry up and get dinner on the table!

A woman dressed in yellow fries eggs on the stove-top as a space-suit-clad astronaut approaches her. Still from a 1970 video about the Apollo 11 space suits. Image courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

Oh if I started to analyse this I would need several posts so I’ll leave it here without further comment. Except to say there’s definitely a trope at work here, as you see in this discussion of a Space Age washing machine.

DuPont may not have been quite the equal opportunity employer, even for the menial and repetitive tasks that were meant to suit women’s brains. In 1971, John C. Thomas, a Senior Patent Investigator at DuPont, wrote a letter to the CEO, Charles B. McCoy, urging him to give women more opportunities. ‘I have a feeling that the 1970’s may be the decade of a great push for women’s rights’, he wrote. McCoy replied, ‘I assure you the company is giving this matter more than lip service’.

I looked through two digitised advertising booklets from 1966. Wall-to-wall men, with two exceptions: a physicist and a toxicologist, neither linked particularly to Apollo materials. And, of course, some secretaries, receptionists and librarians, and a few women demonstrating synthetic fabrics used in fashion.

From the article ‘Our People’, This is DuPont magazine, 1966. Image shows 8 headshots of DuPont employees including two women, a physicist and a secretary. Hagley Museum and Library, PC_fHD96519D94A5_01_1966

Maybe there just weren’t any women working on the Apollo thermal insulation. I might have found more in the DuPont magazines, but I’d need to look through each issue in the relevant time frame. The next step would be to contact the Hagley Library and Museum to discuss with the archivists – perhaps a future project when I’ve got time, or for someone else who would like to take it up. 

I might not have found the answers I was looking for, but this was for me a very interesting excursion into materials, history and gender.

References

Talentino, J.P. 1966 Development of the fabrication and packaging technique for the Echo II satellite. NASA TMX-55764