Before Apollo 11 lifted off, the seamstresses at the Playtex bra factory in Delaware hand-stitched 21 layers of fabric into each spacesuit using sewing machines and a tolerance of one sixty-fourth of an inch, because no machine could be trusted with the only thing standing between Neil Armstrong and the vacuum of the Moon.

Before Apollo 11 lifted off, the seamstresses at the Playtex bra factory in Delaware hand-stitched 21 layers of fabric into each spacesuit using sewing machines and a tolerance of one sixty-fourth of an inch, because no machine could be trusted with the only thing standing between Neil Armstrong and the vacuum of the Moon.

Inside a former girdle factory in Dover, Delaware, in the summer of 1968, women who had spent their careers sewing brassieres and Playtex Living Girdles were threading single-needle Singer machines through 21 layers of nylon, neoprene, Mylar, Dacron and Teflon-coated fiberglass — and they were doing it to a tolerance of 1/64th of an inch, by hand, because the engineers at ILC Industries had concluded that no automated machine on Earth could be t…