Adam Savage has been posting videos of his visits to the Smithsonian where he meets with conservator Lisa Young, who specializes in preserving historic objects connected to the U.S. space program. In this video she’s telling Adam how teams of women spent weeks and weeks building up the heat shield on the Apollo crew capsule by hand, squeezing an insulating paste into 370,000 individual honeycomb cells that made up the protective covering. Judging from the shocked expression on Adam’s face, this is the first time he’s heard this story, which wouldn’t be unusual. Photos and films of the space program have for years exclusively shown white-shirted men looking very important as they design and build space ships and launch facilities apparently without any help at all from women, when in fact thousands and thousands of women labored terrifically to send (exclusively) men to the moon. It’s only recently that stories of the space program have highlighted how women sewed the space suits, women strung the miles of copper wire that made the flight computers, women wrote the millions of lines of computer code that enabled Armstrong and Aldrin and all the rest to land on the moon. It’s virtually a rite of passage for space nerds to learn this now. Brava to Lisa Young for bringing this to Adam’s attention.
This Is Drivel 