Added 1 new A* page:The recent BBC article The Women Who Sew for NASA talks about the female technicians who dominate NASA's cabling and thermal blanketing teams; that golden foil you often see covering sensitive space probe components, for instance, is stitched together from "over 20 individual layers - some just 1/1000th of an inch thick," then hand-sewn into place on the spacecraft.
The article also points to several examples of similarly skilled female technicians who made earlier, crucial leaps in NASA's space exploration possible:
- the custom spacecraft program hardware of the Apollo spacecraft was woven together by a team nick-named the "little old ladies": "many of them were in fact young women, threading copper wires through tiny magnetic loops to create the individual ones and zeros of programme code."
- "the seamstresses of lingerie brand Playtex pioneered new sewing techniques to create the Apollo spacesuits. Working to unprecedented levels of precision, and often late into the night, their innovations made human spaceflight possible."
... I really need to learn to sew one of these days.
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