Pamela Cooper Part 1: Patterning Under Pressure

The Softgoods Engineering of NASA’s Artemis III Suit

When traditional aerospace engineers design a space system, they usually work in rigid CAD environments like SolidWorks. But when it comes to wrapping a human body in a flexible, pressurized micro-spacecraft that must survive the lunar south pole, standard mechanical modeling hits a wall.

"At my job, they would only hire aerospace engineers as softgoods designers, but many of them had no basic understanding of construction or textiles," explains Pamela Cooper, the apparel designer who served as sole Spacesuit Designer on Axiom Space's AxEMU program for NASA's Artemis III mission. "They genuinely believed that whatever they designed in SolidWorks would sew up looking just like their 3D model. If you know anything about working with fabric, you know it never works like that."

Having transitioned from high-end fashion at Calvin Klein and founding her therapeutic wearable startup inCare, Cooper brought a critical, material-first perspective to the softgoods lab. She highlights why textiles are their own kind of high-level engineering.

Understanding how materials move, stretch, and react under tension is central to softgoods design. As Cooper puts it, lingerie and body-contouring fashion are deceptively mathematical:

"Lingerie really is the rocket science of fashion! ... You need real math to engineer a great-fitting bra. Fast forward to my time working on actual spacesuits: whenever I ran into a complex engineering problem, I’d just ground myself with the mindset, 'It’s really just one giant boob I have to cover with cloth.'"

That structural mindset proved vital when solving one of the hardest challenges in suit design: joint articulation and sizing across extreme anatomical diversity.

NASA’s Artemis program mandates that the AxEMU suit accommodate a wider range of body types and genders than any suit before it, including the first woman and person of color to walk on the Moon. Achieving proper fit across the 1st through 99th percentiles in a pressurized environment introduce massive mechanical complexity.

"Figuring out sizing to cover the 1st through 99th percentiles is definitely the hardest part," Cooper notes. "When you're designing for such a broad spectrum of body types, you have to engineer a sizing scheme that scales cleanly across everyone. It gets especially tricky when you’re trying to pressurize joints like knees and elbows, which sit at different proportions on every single subject. If the joint articulation isn't aligned perfectly with the wearer's anatomy, it can create painful pinch points or unexpected dive points in the pressurized suit."

To overcome this without building custom suits for every astronaut, Axiom engineered a modular scheme:

"Our suit is built on a modular design scheme, meaning it can quickly adapt to fit a wide range of body types from the 1st to 99th percentile. Realistically, no human is an exact fit for a standard off-the-shelf size, so we guarantee proper fit by swapping out individual arms, legs, shoulders, and hip assemblies. The suit is kind of built like a Mr. Potato Head. You can swap the limbs out seamlessly while keeping the central hardware intact."

The design loop for softgoods relies on constant human-in-the-loop testing. Cooper’s workflow moved continuously from deep research to CAD models, down to the softgoods lab for fabrication, and immediately into physical testing on human subjects, repeating until performance targets were hit.

However, selecting textiles for the suit's outer layer presented unique physical constraints. Most flight textiles come from NASA’s pre-approved database to avoid off-gassing risks in a vacuum, limiting new material adoption. But the Moon’s Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) introduced an environmental hazard that forced novel material creation:

"These areas contain high concentrations of plasma, creating a severe risk of electrostatic discharge the moment an astronaut steps onto the lunar surface," Cooper explains. "To meet NASA’s requirement for full electrical bonding across the entire suit assembly, we had to innovate and develop a custom, proprietary fabric engineered specifically to dissipate static charge."

This intersection between textile engineering and structural protection is where fashion and aerospace converge. Whether working with smart compression textiles at fashion-tech startups like House of Zera or analyzing how avant-garde designers like Robert Wun use sculptural, heavy-drape silhouettes to explore armor and environmental defense, the core engineering question remains identical: How do we manipulate flexible materials to protect and optimize the human form in extreme conditions?

As Cooper points out, aerospace needs this interdisciplinary lens now more than ever. Traditional engineering ensures mechanisms function, but textile and product designers bridge the gap between mechanical hardware and human reality.

Image sourced via FOX 35 Orlando. Used for editorial purposes only. No commercial use. All rights belong to their respective owners.

Keep an eye out for parts 2 and 3!