Original version

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

The Documentary

Documentaries

Factual

Investigating global developments, issues and affairs.

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

BBC World Service South Asia

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

BBC World Service East Asia

BBC World Service News Internet

The Documentary: Hey Sisters, Sew Sisters

SkyLab seamstress

31/12/2019 GMT

Hey Sisters, Sew Sisters

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Hey Sisters, Sew Sisters

The seamstresses who sewed soft goods components for space craft and space suits

The seamstresses who sewed soft goods components for space craft and space suits.

Space travel is not always high-tech. When the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon in 1969, seamstresses made their spacesuits at a company famous for stitching latex into Playtex bras.
 
During the Space Shuttle era, a group of 18 women were in charge of all soft goods - the fabrics for machine and hand sewing the spaceplane’s thermal blankets. These women became known as the Sew Sisters.
 
Presenter, artist and former Nasa astronaut Nicole Stott meets some of these ‘sew sisters’ from past and present missions and celebrates their contributions.
 
Their work, and that of seamstresses before them, was often a matter of life and death yet was not always taken seriously. Engineers would drop by to ask the women to hem their pants or sew their buttons on but they were doing difficult work. 
 
They used ceramic thread to stitch fibre glass-backed quartz fabric around the edges of doors, ports and the bottom of the Space Shuttle’s three engines to provide a thermal barrier where components came together. In private the women called themselves the ‘Itch, Stitch and Bitch Club’ because the fabric was so itchy.
 
Hand sewing is not consigned to the past either. Recent images from Saturn were from a spacecraft with cut, stitched and fitted gold and black thermal blankets and the BepiColombo mission, currently on its way to Mercury, involves hand sewing.

(Photo: SkyLab seamstress sewing space suits for astronauts. Credit: Nasa)

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Documentary

Hey Sisters, Sew Sisters

Genres

Brand

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

About BBC World Service