"Might work," he grumped. "That's two. How about the spacesuit part?"
That had been tougher. Some forty or fifty men had made the ride into space and back from Cape Canaveral by this time, and there had been rendezvous in space in preparation for flights to the moon. But so far no one had done any free maneuvering in space in a suit.
They had put me in a swimming pool in a concentrated salt solution that gave me just zero buoyancy, and I had practiced a kind of skin-diving in a spacesuit. The problem was one of mobility, and the one thing we could not reproduce, of course, was frictionless motion. No matter how I moved, the viscosity of the solution quickly slowed me down. Out in space I'd have to learn on the first try how to get around where every force imparted a motion that would continue indefinitely until an equal and opposite force had been applied.
The force part had been worked out in theory long before. To my spacesuit they had fixed two tiny rockets. One aimed out from the small of my back, the other straight out from my belly. Two pressurized containers contained hydrazine and nitric acid, which could be released in tiny streams into peanut rocket chambers by a single valve-release. They were self-igniting, and spurted out a needle-fine jet of fire that imparted a few dynes of force as long as the valve was held open. It only had two positions—full open, or closed, so that navigation would consist of triggering the valve briefly open until a little push had been imparted, and drifting until you triggered the opposite rocket for braking.
The airtanks on my back were right off a scuba outfit.
Really, they spent more time on the gloves than anything else. At first we thought of the problem as a heat problem, but it was tougher than that. Heat loss was not much, out there in a vacuum, and they made arrangements to warm the handles of my tools so that I wouldn't bleed heat through my gloves to them and thus freeze my fingers. No, the problem was to get a glove that stood up to a pressure difference of three or four pounds per square inch and could still be flexed with any accuracy by my fingers. We could make a glove that was pretty thin, but it stiffened out under pressure and made delicate work really tough. It was a lot like trying to do brain surgery in mittens.
They eventually gave me a porous glove that leaked air when you flexed your fingers. Air, they said, could always be gotten from the Dyna-Soar rocket that would be hanging close at hand in space. Well, we hoped it would work. I could do pretty fair work with the leaky gloves, and all we could hope was that the vapor would be dry enough as it seeped out through the gloves to prevent formation of a foggy cloud all around me, or the formation of frost on the gloves. That we could not test under any conditions easy to simulate.
Each team spent ninety days. They tell me that's right quick work for pointing up a launch. But at the end of three months I had assembled enough stuff to do the job, and still well within the weight limit they had to set. I wasn't a walking machine shop, but there was a lot I could do if I had to.
Ninety days had been enough for several dates with Sylvia. Out of the office she wasn't quite the protective harpy about Paul Cleary that she had been in the office, although the thought was never far from her mind.