NASA Goes to the Movies

Hollywood costume guru Chris Gilman has watched actor after actor rocket into celluloid space wearing his astronaut costumes.

Now, because his spacesuits are so well-crafted, down to the 24-karat gold he melts on the visors and the innovative way he molds the helmets, NASA has asked Gilman to help design the real thing.

In the first contract of its kind, a quirky instance of life imitating art imitating life, the space agency is teaming up with the North Hollywood costume and prop maker to develop the next generation of spacesuits that may fly as far as Mars.

NASA engineers were so impressed by the look of Gilman’s suits, which have appeared in “Deep Impact” and the HBO miniseries “From Earth to the Moon,” that the agency recently paid $24,855 for one of his costumes so they could get ideas from it for real space wear.

But Gilman’s suit wouldn’t cut it in space, any more than a concept car would carry you on vacation. Someone wearing Gilman’s suit who stepped into space, where temperatures swing from 250 degrees in the sun to 250 degrees below zero in shadow, would suffocate for lack of oxygen and then sizzle or freeze.

A real spacesuit is a complex life-support mechanism with 19,000 parts and costs $10.4 million. Gilman is a wardrobe designer, a man of cloth, plastic and glue. He’s been called on to shape the appearance and fit of future suits, not the mechanics, NASA says.

Still, Gilman is shocked that he’s working with NASA at all.

“Just think about it,” Gilman said. “You’re the premiere space agency in the world and you go to a Hollywood effects company to design a spacesuit. You got to be out of your mind.”

At 37, Gilman has lived a rich life--breathing fire (as a stuntman), playing a hooded executioner in a feature film, marrying his wife, Pia, while wearing a suit of gilded armor.

Yet his lifelong passion--one he has kept aglow the 15 years he has been making rubber-headed aliens and retractable knives for Hollywood--has been to work for NASA. As a kid, he wanted to be an astronaut, an aspiration doomed by a lazy eye.

Two years ago, though, he planted the seed of a future in the space industry.

During a visit to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Gilman was measuring a spacesuit for a costume in the same room that NASA engineers were testing another suit. The engineers were having trouble gripping a hammer through a space glove. Gilman, who didn’t go to college and prides himself on being a self-schooled engineer, chimed in with a suggestion and whipped together a strap out of duct tape.

The strap was modeled on a method that medieval knights used to hold their swords (medieval armor is Gilman’s second love). It worked, and NASA engineers were impressed.

“Funny thing was,” Gilman said, “the NASA guys didn’t realize the strap idea was 500 years old.”

Last December, NASA was casting about for someone to design a prototype of a more comfortable suit for space shuttle missions that could fit a wider range of sizes. Time mattered. NASA needed the full-scale prototype built to exacting specifications within six weeks. NASA’s own engineers weren’t prepared to do it that quickly.

Enter Gilman. He contacted the NASA design team, who remembered him from his visits to the suit lab, and presented his credentials, which were long on show biz, short on space science: a Technical Achievement Award from the Motion Picture Academy in 1991 for developing a “cool-suit” device for actors to wear under heavy monster costumes; a shop equipped with welders, lathes, a vacuum mold-maker and scores of other prop-making tools; and samples of previous work, from the mask in “The Mask” to spacesuit replicas.

Gilman’s spacesuits are minutely detailed studies in illusion. They take hundreds of hours to make and cost $1,500 a week to rent. Every buckle, strap, knob and switch on the suits is measured, molded, cast and machined in his shop, Global Effects Inc.

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For the shell, Gilman uses the same Teflon fabric that NASA uses, at $220 a yard. For the face shields, he blows the plastic by hand and coats each piece with a film of 24-karat gold, just like the real helmets.

Even the pros are fooled.

“It was very tough to tell his suits weren’t real,” said Dave Scott, an Apollo astronaut, one of the 12 men to stand on the moon. “When I saw them on the set of ‘From Earth to the Moon’ [where Scott worked as a technical consultant], I thought those suits looked right.”

In mid-December, NASA awarded Gilman the $24,855 contract. Five weeks later, Gilman, who is used to stitching costumes at light speed for stressed-out costume designers, showed up in Houston, suit in hand.

His “volumetric mock-up,” in NASA-speak, isn’t simply a replica of a current shuttle suit. It is full of innovations, including a roomier face shield, LED helmet lights and specially mounted shoulder bearings to allow more mobility.

NASA engineers will put it through a battery of tests to develop space gear for missions to the international space station and possibly Mars. It’s too early to tell exactly what future spacesuits will look like, but the aesthetics and ergonomics of Gilman’s suit may be incorporated in future NASA designs, said Robert Yowell, a project engineer in NASA’s suit division.

Wasn’t Yowell, who in the past turned to aerospace companies to build prototypes, wary of buying a model suit from a prop shop?

“We needed the suit quickly, and that’s what this guy is good at,” Yowell said.

Gilman’s ambition now is to build a version of his suit that can be pressurized for more sophisticated tests.

Gilman’s colleagues in the effects business couldn’t be prouder.

“This is Chris’ boyhood passion,” said Erica Phillips, a costume designer who worked with Gilman on the movie “Outbreak.”

“First, he carved out a niche in spacesuits. Now he has this deal with NASA. It’s the most wonderful, wondrous thing.”