WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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- A spacesuit has to do three things.

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It has to maintain pressure

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so your blood doesn't start
boiling in the vacuum of space.

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It has to provide oxygen
so you can breathe.

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And it has to protect
against the environment:

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extreme heat, extreme cold,
and direct sunlight.

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This...

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...won't do any of those.
It's just a replica of that one.

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That's the actual Sokol spacesuit

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that Tim Peake, the most recent
British astronaut, used in space.

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The folks here at the
National Space Centre

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wouldn't let me try on a real one,
which is fair enough.

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Versions of that suit have been protecting
astronauts since the 1970s.

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And there are variants still used today.

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It's not designed for
hours-long space walks.

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It's basically an
emergency personal lifeboat

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for if the ship you're travelling on...
uh, springs a leak.

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And it provides those three things:

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pressure, oxygen,
environmental protection.

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Now a couple of months ago,
I had a video where an AI

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tried to suggest stories and
titles that I could cover.

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And one of the things it came up with

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was "the long-forgotten history
of the British moon landings".

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Not strictly true, of course.
We never actually got there.

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But one of the team here got in touch,

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and it turns out that in the 1940s,

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15 years before Kennedy said that
America "chose to go to the moon",

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the British Interplanetary Society
did have similar plans,

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including our own spacesuit.

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- The BIS was set up in 1933
by a man called Phil Cleator.

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And he had this plan.

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He wanted to get together
with like-minded individuals

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who were interested in space flight,

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and what the possible future
of space flight might be.

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Rocket technology was suddenly
moving forward in a way

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that, actually, spaceflight
was something tangible

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and might well be realistic.

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- The BIS weren't seriously expecting

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to launch a mission to
the moon on their own.

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But they did want to say,

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"Hey, we think this is possible.
And we think Britain should do it."

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And one of their number,
illustrator Ralph Smith,

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drew up plans for a spacesuit.

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- So we have an exhibition here
at the National Space Centre

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that focuses on the space race.

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And people tend to think about
America and the Soviet Union.

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And we wanted to tell something

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of what Britain was up to
at the same time.

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As we were planning for our exhibition,

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we were leafing through
a research document

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and looking at the history of the BIS.

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And immediately this picture jumped out

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of somebody wearing this incredible-
looking spacesuit that they'd designed.

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And immediately we just said,
"We have to make this."

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- It looks wonderful,
but no one ever built it...

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until a few years ago.

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- So, I get a call,
and where do you start?

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You've got two drawings basically.
Rather than just say,

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"Well, I'll make a replica,
a facsimile of it."

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I thought "Let's look at the materials
that were available at the time."

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Cotton and rubber, much
like a modern space suit

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is made out of beta fabric and
a rubber pressure layer inside.

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And the pressure's inside it.

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It can't expand out any further.
It can't balloon out.

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He would have an oxygen
supply in his backpack there.

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So he's being fed this oxygen supply

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going through, past his
face, down through the suit,

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and recycling back into the backpack again

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for expulsion in the way
just like an Apollo suit did.

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Here you've got
what we call the "convolutes".

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And they're to give a bit
of movement at the arm.

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And right up here, you've
got cloth of silver.

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If he's getting cold on
the surface of the moon,

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he can then pull this cape around him.

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And now any heat that's
radiating out from the suit,

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he can then trap that heat in.

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And it reflects the heat
back into the body again.

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So these little pins
here, they are, in fact

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little stand-off mushrooms.

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So when the cape is hanging over them,

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there's a gap between
the surface of the suit

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and the surfaces of the cape.

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And that gap of vacuum

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means there's no physical
thermal transfer from the suit

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out into the vacuum of space.

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You'll have noticed that
on the front of his chest,

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he's got this rather strange device here.

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This is an airlock.

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Imagine the circumstances.
You're on the surface of the moon.

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You find an interesting rock.
You open the airlock.

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You put the rock into the air lock.
You close the airlock.

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Now you withdraw your arms inside the suit

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through these exceptionally
large holes here.

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And using that long front,
you can examine that rock

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that you've just taken
off the lunar surface.

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But you also notice,
there is a shooting stick.

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And it gives you a walking stick-cum-seat.

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You get tired on the surface of the moon.

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You open the seat part of the
shooting stick and you sit down.

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They've kind of thought
of everything, really.

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So how do you build something like this
and stay to those 1940s techniques?

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We turned to what would have
been available at the time,

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even to this silver finish
here on the helmet.

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And in fact, the people we went to
to get this vacuum plating done,

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they were the original company

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that would have been doing the original
if it had ever happened.

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And in fact, when we took
the helmet into them,

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they said, "Oh, well, we
finally got to do it then."

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- There's newsreel footage from the 1940s

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which says the BIS estimated
half a million pounds

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to send someone to the moon.

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In today's money, that's about 20 million.

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The Apollo program roughly cost
the US government 10,000 times that.

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It's safe to say that the
BIS's plans were optimistic.

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So how well would the British
spacesuit have held up

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against an actual trip to the moon?

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- We're pretty sure this
would be the Mark 1.

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If this had ever really
walked on the moon,

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this would have been the
Mark 8, the Mark 9.

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Remember on the moon, you
only have to pressurise up,

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if you're breathing pure oxygen,
to about 4½ pounds per square inch.

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This easily would have been
capable of taking that pressure,

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but it just would have
been pretty immobile.

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You simply can't lift
your arms up very high.

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Because of the nature
of this deep shoulder

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means that the arm just can't rise up.

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- I think the BIS were very serious
about going to the moon.

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They had nowhere near
as much information

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as NASA would have had
in the 1950s and '60s

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about the realities of space flight,

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and particularly the challenges
of getting to the moon.

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But certainly these weren't crazy people
just throwing around ideas.

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There wer lots of really talented people.

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They were just nowhere near as complex
in terms of the materials that they had,

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but they weren't available
to them at the time.

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So who knows?

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Had they have had the time and the money
to develop the sort of space-age materials

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that went into some of those later suits,
more time to practice

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and actually do some practical
experiments, then who knows?

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Quite possibly.

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- Thank you so much to
everyone at the National Space Centre.

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Along with the space suits,
they've got rockets and satellites,

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and an actual piece of the moon.

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You can find out more about them
at the link in the description.

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I mean, it's probably a good thing

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that the real ones are made
to measure, 'cause, um...