From duck tape to duct tape, this humble roll saved astronauts on Apollo 13. | The History Page

Think about the Apollo missions for a second: we took men over 200,000 miles to the Moon and brought them back safely using rockets that had less computing power than the smartphone in your pocket. During the frantic Space Race, engineers were forced to rely on primitive technology, slide rules, and sheer genius. The rockets themselves were monumental feats of brute-force engineering, and the guidance systems were often analog, backed up by human calculation. The margin for error was almost non-

#Spacesuit technology has changed very little in 50 years. Astronauts still spacewalk in rigid, air-filled suits that make movement difficult - and which are often built to fit male astronauts’ physiques. Research on a new design has been ongoing for two decades. The skintight ‘BioSuit’, developed by Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics Dava Newman and her team at @MITnews, aims to give #astronauts the flexibility of ‘an Olympic athlete’, while still protecting them from low pressure, extrem