Draft:Hazel Fellows

Fellows was part of a team of women, both African American and white, who constructed the spacesuits for the Apollo missions in the 1960s. Fellows' team on the International Latex Corporation ("ILC") production line also included Iona Allen, Delema Austin, Doris Boisey, Julia Brown, Delema Comegys, Joanne Thompson, Michelle Trice, Jeanne Wilson, and Delores Zeroles. Fellows and other team members at ILC, in Dover, Delaware, had knowledge of materials and construction methods that, when combined with engineering expertise, was able to generate suits that protected NASA astronauts and enabled them to do their work.

Using nylon, latex, Teflon and Lycra, Fellows and other seamstresses sewed 21 layers of thin fabric together with a 1/64th-inch tolerance stitch, a "kind of a super-human feat of sewing." Neil Armstrong's suit is on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall and online. Their efforts are detailed in MIT Professor and Head of Architecture Nicholas de Monchaux's 2011 book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo.

While more visible roles of the U.S. space program in the 1960s was male, women such as Fellows, mathematician Katherine Johnson, computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, anatomist Rita Rapp, and engineer Frances "Poppy" Northcutt were also key to the function and success of the Apollo program.