Spacesuits Revealed: Smithsonian Exhibit to Show X-Ray Images of What Lies Beneath

A new art exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum will show off an astronaut's suit and all of its intricacies beneath the surface, the Associated Press reported.

Space suits were originally imagined as "wearable spacecraft" and the exhibit, named "Suited for Space," will open Friday to highlight the ingenuity behind the space exploration suit.

Space history curator Cathleen Lewis said the exhibit will have x-ray images of space suits and are the first of such images ever created to conserve and study.

"You don't realize what a complex machine these are," Lewis said. But the X-rays of Alan Shepard's Apollo spacesuit and a 1960s prototype "allow visitors to see beyond what is visible to the naked eye, through the protective layers of the suit to see the substructures that are embedded inside."

The exhibit will also highlight the transformation the suits made from the early test flight models of the 1930s to the space age and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions. Lewis also said fashion and aesthetics also had as much to do with the suit's design as technology did.

"NASA had a demand to create the astronauts into a whole new corps, a non-military corps. So here was an opportunity to dress them in a new uniform ... that evokes sensibilities of that Buck Rogers imagination," she said. "All of these guys, the engineers, they grew up on science fiction. They fed it with their ideas, and they were consumers of it at the same time."

The exhibit will visit ten cities through 2015 and will go from Washington D.C. to Tampa, Fla. next. Curators are concerned with the decomposition and discoloration some of the suits are experiencing 50 years after they were made.

Albert Watson, a photographer known for celebrity and fashion portraits, such as his iconic shot of Steve Jobs, took a break from his work in 1990 and instead photographed spacesuits and other artifacts. He donated two of his Apollo prints to the exhibit.

"When you deal with celebrities every day or super models every day and fashion people every day, there is always a nice escape to go into still life," he said. "As a child, I loved science fiction. I always remember arguing with my father about rocket ships. He said man will never go into space, he said, because what goes up must come down."