INGRID DOWS - AN ALTERNATE STORY PART 3 - THE SPACE AGE by Michel Poulin - HTML preview

CHAPTER 22 – GETTING FITTED FOR A NEW SUIT

10:25 (California Time)

Thursday, January 29, 1953 ‘C’

Ingrid’s executive office, Hughes prototype center

Grand Central Airport, Glendale, Los Angeles

California, U.S.A.

Ingrid was busy but also happy as she worked through the accumulated paperwork in her ‘in’ basket, the result of her three-month stint as Secretary of Defense. Earl Warren had kept his word and had let her go after he had been officially sworn in as President nine days ago and had let her go with genuine thanks once she had briefed her replacement, a highly competent and experienced big industry executive who had also served as a general officer during World War 2. Now she was fully back in the job she loved: designing and flying aircraft. John Milton, her senior aircraft design engineer, had done a commendable job in her absence and had expertly piloted the various projects and programs of the prototype center, which was now proving a big time-saver for her.

She was about to grab the next file on her ‘in’ pile when someone knocked on the door of her executive office.

‘’Come in!’’

Her engineer specialist in environmental systems and ergonomics, Janice Hunter, then entered, closely followed by a man and a woman carrying a fairly large trunk.

‘’Hi, Ingrid! I brought something for you: a new suit which needs to be fitted for you.’’

‘’A new suit? What suit?’’

She then understood what Janice meant when she saw the markings on the trunk. Her questioning look then changed to a big, happy smile.

‘’Is it our prototype of a spacesuit?’’

‘’Only parts of it: we brought only the inner pressurized part, which we now need to custom-fit for you. The outer suit, which is meant to provide protection against radiations and thermal extremes, is much looser and can simply be put on over the pressurized body suit.’’

‘’Hell, I can’t wait to try it!’’ said Ingrid while getting up from behind her desk to go to the trunk, which the two technicians had put down on the carpet of her office. The two technicians then opened the trunk, revealing what looked a lot like a dark-grey diver’s neoprene suit, laid on top of a collection of metallic parts, including a large helmet. Ingrid watched on with glee as Janice Hunter took the dark suit out of the trunk and held it up at the vertical, revealing the fact that the suit was made in two parts joined at abdomen level by an oval metallic ring seal.

‘’This is the innermost suit of our spacesuit design. It was designed to keep you inside a pressurized and climate-controlled environment while providing you with breathing air. This was by far the most difficult and critical part of our project, mostly because we wanted it to give you a good range of body flexibility while preventing the suit from ballooning out once under pressure and in the vacuum of Space. You sure wouldn’t want to look like the proverbial Michelin Tire Man while in Space, right?’’

‘’Right!’’ replied Ingrid with an amused grin. ‘’But how did you manage to make it flexible while preventing it from ballooning out?’’

‘’The answer to that is in a hard-shell external layer made of titanium plates, which fit tightly over the non-flexing areas of your body when you are wearing this pressure suit. This external hard-shell suit is clipped shut over your pressure suit and prevents it from ballooning out, letting only the joint areas of the suit uncovered. If fitted correctly to you, the surface area of the pressure suit left free to balloon out is kept to the bare minimum, while carefully adjusted straps help those uncovered areas relatively close to your body. The hard-shell outer suit also offers some protection against radiations and prevents your pressurized suit from being punctured by a tool, sharp corners and micro-meteorite impacts. Finally, a third layer is put on over both the pressurized suit and the hard-shell suit, in order to protect you from temperature extremes and give you extra protection against radiations.’’

‘’Clever, really! Is it easy to put on and off?’’

‘’You are about to see about that, Ingrid. First, though, you will need to strip: this spacesuit is meant to be worn with no clothes on, except for socks and underwear. If in Space, you would also wear an adult diaper instead of a panty.’’

‘’Alright, then.’’ said Ingrid, who then started to remove her business suit, carefully laying it flat on top of her work desk in order not to wrinkle it. When she removed her silk blouse, that revealed the fact that she was not wearing a bra. While she didn’t seem concerned one bit about that, the poor male technician couldn’t help fix her small but firm breasts, while he fought to keep an impassive expression. Ingrid made it even harder to keep his cool by taking off her panty as well, revealing the fact that her groin area was closely shaved.

‘’I prefer to remove my panty before putting on this suit because it is fairly loose and could bunch up under the pressurized layer. Besides, I believe that Mister Amundsen has seen naked women before. You are married, aren’t you, Mister Amundsen?’’

‘’Er, yes, Miss Dows.’’ answered the poor male technician as both Janice Hunter and the female technician giggled at his heroic efforts not to stare at Ingrid’s young nude body. Ingrid then approached Janice and examined the pressure suit from up close.

‘’So, how do I put this on, Janice?’’

‘’You first put on the lower part, the same way you would put on a tight pair of jeans, then slip the top part over your head while inserting your arms in the suit’s sleeves. Once that is done, you will clip together and secure the metallic ring seal at navel-level. We will then be able to start making the fine adjustments to the pressurized suit before covering it with its hard-shell outer layer.’’

Following closely the instructions from Janice, Ingrid found that putting on the tight, body-hugging but flexible pressure suit was much easier than she had expected and was no harder than to put on a diver’s neoprene wet suit. Once she had put on both the lower and the upper halves of the pressure suit, she looked at the metal sealing rings around her belly, neck, wrists and ankles.

‘’So, what’s next, Janice?’’

‘’You click together the upper and lower halves, by joining the two rings at belly level. They have double safety mechanisms, to make it impossible for your pressure suit to open unless you make deliberate, coordinated gestures with both hands. The hard-shell ‘panty’ of the lower half, to which the flexible parts of the lower suit are hermetically fixed, both helps you to flex your legs while in vacuum and also contains in its frontal part a pressurized codpiece-like shell holding a urine collecting bag. You will thus have a choice between wearing a diaper or having a urethra evacuation tube put in place for longer missions in orbit. I will now show you how to seal together the twin belly-level rings.’’

That part took only a few seconds, after which Janice’s two technicians started clipping shut and adjusting the multiple fabric straps judiciously fixed along the outer surfaces of the suit. As they went, they noted down the adjustments needed for each strap, which made it a much longer part of Ingrid’s suiting up process. That took a good forty minutes, at the end of which Janice personally inspected the adjustments made before nodding to Ingrid.

‘’Now that the fine adjustments have been made, they will then be made permanent, so that you don’t take more than a couple of minutes to put on your spacesuit. And please: don’t get fat! We would then need to completely readjust or even rebuild entirely your spacesuit.’’

‘’Roger that! What’s next?’’

‘’We attach your hard-shell outer suit to your pressure suit before adjusting its plates’ tightening clips. The main function of that hard-shell outer suit is to prevent your pressure suit from ballooning up around you when in vacuum. Since its plates cover only the non-rotating and non-flexing parts of your body, it will not impede your movements, while providing you some protection against radiations and accidental punctures to your pressure suit. Once done, you may find that you now have a ‘Joan of Arc’ look with that suit on.’’

‘’Hey, Joan of Arc is my favorite historical heroin. Uh, I see that the outer plates are still unpainted. Are you planning to paint them later on?’’

‘’We could, but I haven’t really thought about that. Note that the third layer of your spacesuit, which is looser fitting and much thicker in order to protect you from temperature extremes and radiations, may not need to be put on if you are on a strictly intra-atmospheric mission, like a long-range strategic reconnaissance mission at high altitude and hypersonic speeds. Then, your outer hard-shell suit will be apparent to observers. So, with that in mind, do you have a color which you would prefer for your hard-shell suit, Ingrid?’’

Ingrid only had to think for a second before answering Janice with a smile on her lips.

‘’Hell, make me look like a knight in shining armor, like Joan of Arc. Apply a chromium reflexive coating to the plates.’’

‘’One knight in shining armor, coming up!’’ replied Janice, also smiling. ‘’It actually could prove useful, as you would then be very easy to spot if a rescue team is looking for you after a crash-landing at sea or in a deserted area. The only things left to do, if you except putting on the third, isolating suit, will be to clip on your gloves, boots and helmet. Those can be worn with or without the isolating suit on.’’ Janice then had her technicians take those parts out of the trunk they had brought. Fixing them to Ingrid’s suit was a matter of only a few seconds, following which Ingrid went to the full-length mirror sitting in a corner of her office, in order to admire herself.

‘’Outstanding! This suit looks really great. Let me just do some flexing movements, so that I could see how much liberty of movement it allows me.’’

‘’Don’t forget that, once under pressure and in a vacuum, your mobility will be noticeably reduced, Ingrid. However, that loss of mobility is impossible to totally avoid. Even in Nancy Laplante’s time, spacesuits were both bulky and heavy and also significantly reduced mobility. I used some of the more advanced concepts made by 2012 but had not been actually built to design this suit. ’’

‘’Janice, you and your engineers and technicians did the best possible job, truly. Let me now do some flexing and bending.’’

That part went well enough, with Ingrid finding her suit’s flexibility more than acceptable. She especially liked the fact that the environmental systems and air reserve of the suit were fixed to the front of her hard-shell torso, preventing any discomfort from having to sit down with a big bump in her back. It also allowed her to be able to see the small instrument display panel of her environmental systems by looking down through the large transparent visor of her helmet. She also like the fact that her helmet, which was hermetically fixed directly to her hard-shell torso part and had a hinged visor that could be opened, was an extra-large bubble, allowing her to freely twist, turn and lower or raise her head inside her helmet, thus mostly eliminating any possible sensation of claustrophobia while in her suit.

‘’This is really great, Janice. I love it!’’

‘’What about the design work on your spaceplane, Ingrid? How advanced is it and how long do you expect it to be before you can do your first test flight?’’

‘’The work on our spaceplane design has actually advanced faster than I myself had hoped for, mostly thanks to the genius of Mister Richard Whitcomb. He quickly found out a number of key facts concerning hypersonic flight and then tested in our hypersonic wind tunnel a number of scale models of what he thought to be the best possible shapes for our spaceplane. He and I then were able to finalize the basic shape and design of our future spaceplane. On their part, the engineers and chemists of our missile division came up with the best possible combination of propulsion engines for it, both jet engines and rocket motors. My design team here is now hard at work doing the design calculations for the STARBLAZER. We should be able to fly the first test of our spaceplane in about two years.’’

‘’Wow! I hate to think about how much longer any government-led Space-related program would take before it could do its first launch. Even compared to what Nancy Laplante’s history said about Space exploration, you will be ahead by about two years compared to the first ever Space launch by either us or the Soviets.’’

‘’Don’t forget that the missions of our STARBLAZER will not be limited to Space missions in orbit: it will actually be primarily a high-altitude strategic reconnaissance asset, until a first stage heavy transporter could be built to help it reach orbit.’’

‘’All that without a cent of support from our government: you are truly incredible, Ingrid.’’

‘’Paah! I do this mostly so that I could one day admire Earth from orbit. Nancy told me many times how beautiful the view of Earth from Space was. Talking of our future spaceplane, give me a minute.’’ Ingrid, still wearing her spacesuit and with her helmet visor opened, then walked out of her office and into the adjacent industrial drawing room used by her prototype design team, making heads snap around at once. Stopping in the middle of the room and adopting an authoritative stance, she shouted out in a fake severe tone of voice.

‘’ALRIGHT, PEOPLE: LET’S STEP ON IT! I’M NOT GOING TO WAIT FOR CENTURIES WHILE WEARING THIS SUIT!’’