Contributing technologies of Spacesuite design

Related preceding technologies contain the gas mask used in WWII, the oxygen mask used by pilots of elevated flying bombers in WWII, the high altitude or vacuum suit required by pilots of the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird, the diving suit, rebreather, scuba diving gear and many others.

Spacesuits in fiction

Fiction authors have been frustrating to design spacesuits since the beginning of space fiction, as far as there was need to describe them in their stories. Most of them are flexible stress suits, but usually not as bulky as in real spacesuits. Design was influenced by the real old-type Siebe Gorman customary diving dress, including sometimes such features as side windows on the helmet. In H.G. Wells's The First men in the Moon (publ. 1901) Standard Diving Dresses are fixed with a big backpack cylinder each and used as spacesuits. Many fictional spacesuits have two big backpack cylinders as their only life-support gear, as if the wearer breathes out to space like in normal sport open-circuit scuba. In the well-known Dan Dare series which on track in April 1950 in the `Eagle' comic, the usual Spacefleet spacesuit has no backpack, and a corselet like in Standard Diving Dress. Comic-strip space story authors often do not know about the belongings of internal pressure inflating the spacesuit in space, but draw the spacesuit in space hanging in folds like a boilersuit: that can repeatedly be seen in the Dan Dare stories.