The Long John Space Suit

The Long John Spacesuit

By Lyle R. Amlin

Blowouts happen -- Keep it zipped up!

Getting to Luna in the old days took a while. First was the trip by rocket from either a USA shuttle from Canaveral, or the Russian rocket (cheaper, but not near as comfortable), or the French Guinea ferry (posh and with wine and truffles for snacks but EXPENSIVE).

At any rate, I had taken my first leave from Luna deployment after 3 years there setting up the first base and had returned to Earth for a holiday and visit with my parents in Los Angeles. It didn’t take me long to realize that I had become a Loony for sure. The pollution, mass of people on Earth and the NOISE that assailed my ears from the cell phones people used, personal music players with songs that sounded like jungle drums instead of music and the din of cars, trains and jets was just too much.

I was VERY ready to return home when my three weeks were up. Having been born in America, I decided to take the Canaveral shuttle which was comfortable and more over had the safest record since the early days of the shuttle explosions and crashes. We lifted into low Earth orbit and transferred to the ISS, the first space station, NOT today’s “wheel”, but the zero gravity station put up by the space-faring countries of the day back then.

ESSY, the wheel everyone is familiar with today, was still on the drawing boards back then.

From the ISS we transferred to the Lunar Shuttle which lifted to escape velocity and then took three days to coast up to Luna. There came another transfer to the Lunar Orbiter Satellite Station, the LOSS, (the “Looser” as we Loonies called it) and then the final drop down to the surface of the Moon. The entire trip, back then, took five days, a lot longer than today’s three days with the Earth to Luna direct craft.

Spending three days in zero G aboard the Lunar Shuttle was pretty boring after the first 10 minutes of looking out the viewport at Earth receding. You also have to remember that back in those days we had to wear our space suits for the entire trip. The Lunar Shuttle was pretty basic and while pressurized wasn’t designed to stop any micro-meteorites that might be encountered during the trip and would bleed air pretty quickly if one punched through the thin hulls. We had to keep the suits on and the helmets ready to snap down and seal in three seconds or less.

Those suits were pretty uncomfortable…and itchy…and after two days they were rather, well, “rank” is the word that comes to mind and I don’t mean “official rank” either.

Which brings me to my story.

There were six of us passengers on that Earth to Luna shuttle. Myself and another Loony who was returning from his vacation, two guys from Chicago who were heading to Kaiser’s steel plant at Luna City and a tall, skinny guy of about 30 with a really bad attitude and what seemed to be his secretary, a really pretty blonde about 28, same age as myself. I couldn’t get past “Hello,” with her before the skinny guy would cut in with some classless remark. It turned out he was some sort of suit from Lunar Corp, the collection of nations that made up the company which was developing the moon, and my former boss.

The guys’ name was John something, I never did bother to learn his last name, he wasn’t my type. In fact, he was pretty obnoxious. He felt that since he was so high up in Lunar Corp’s structure that he was superior to everyone else…and he acted like he was a petty dictator, trying to tell the crew how to run the ship, and the rest of us passengers how to do everything from sleep in zero G’s to pee.

The blonde -- I did find out her name was Miss Green -- I think was sleeping with John back on Earth, but so far nothing had happened on board the ship. I was waiting to see what he might try to do in the suit though.

The second day out he announced that he was going to take the suit off, it was just too uncomfortable to leave it on.

I cautioned him that it was against the rules to do that, you wore the suit for safety’s sake, YOUR safety.

He only glared at me and said, “Young man, I’m the second vice secretary to the General Administrator of Lunar Corp, I think I know when it’s safe to take a space suit off.”

The blonde said, “John, dear, don’t you think that…”

He interrupted, “Now don’t YOU start Miss Green, I know what I’m doing here.”

With that he wriggled out of the suit and hung it on a snap hook on the bulkhead wall.

I just shook my head and decided to take a nap if I could, because I was getting damned bored and the two Kaiser guys weren’t talkative, they were busy reading from their “Macibooks”, the new rollup screens Apple was making that could be downloaded with novels and stories for reading, or, in the case of these two guys, porn.

We were about two hours out from LOSS when there was a loud ZAP, SPLAT, ZING and I could hear the air hissing out of the cabin. I yelled, “Hull puncture, put your helmets on.”

The other returning Loony already was slipping his helmet on and the two Kaiser guys were right behind him. Miss Green looked around with large eyes and I reached up and slapped her helmet down over her head and said, “Tighten the clips around the bottom of the helmet.”

I looked at John who just sat there, frozen to his seat, eyes like saucers, hair sticking straight out.

“Get into your suit,” I yelled at him, “NOW!”

He just looked at me, not moving, obviously he was frozen with fear.

I pushed off from my seat toward his suit hanging on the bulkhead, unclipped it and pushed back to his seat. He hadn’t moved and I thought, Oh god, I’m going to have to DRESS him.

I tucked my feet into the floor straps to keep from floating around and unclipped the helmet from his suit. Then I noticed the melted spot on the front of his suit. I turned the suit over and there, on the back, was another huge melted spot of fabric. Damned meteorite went right through the hull and his suit. Its ruined and there’s no way to patch it. This guy is dead and, obnoxious or not, he doesn’t deserve to die for lacking air, I thought.

We still had a good deal of air pressure in the cabin and I hit the intercom to the pilot cabin and told them what had happened. The co-pilot quickly came back and we looked for the entrance hole. He found it and it was small, but too big to patch, the air would be gone in a few minutes.

I looked back at John. He was still frozen. Miss Green had locked down her helmet and had snagged his so it wouldn’t float away. Suddenly I had an idea. “We have any duct tape aboard?” I asked the co-pilot.

“Duct Tape? Uh, yeah, I think we do,” he said, and rummaged in a metal closet. “Here we go, six rolls,” and he sailed a small box over to me.

I took the tape box over to John, then I said to Miss Green, “Help me strip John down to his shorts.”

“Do WHAT?” she said, “I will NOT do that.”

“Do it or he’s dead,” I said as I started to unbutton his shirt.

Miss Green looked at me, then leaned over and, showing experience at the task, unzipped his pants, undid his belt and pulled his pants off, then his sox. He had no shoes on, having taken those off earlier in the day.

I undid the first roll of tape then started tightly wrapping it around his arms and legs, starting at his wrists and ankles. Then I wrapped it around his chest up to his neck. “Hand me the helmet,” I told Miss Green, and then slipped it over his head and quickly began wrapping the duct tape around the helmet and connecting it to the tape around his neck.

I was down to one roll of tape when I was done, but John was finished. I hooked him up to the O2 line from the cabin and put him back into his chair. “Put the seat belt around him now,” I told Miss Green.

The co-pilot looked at me when he came back in a few minutes.

“My God,” he said, you’ve given him a long-john suit! That tape will keep him pressurized and his feet and hands, of course are pretty impervious to losing any air, and he’s getting air through that helmet. I think it’s hard for him to expand his lungs though with all that tape around him. Maybe we should cut it loose and wrap the rest of the tape that you have around his chest a bit looser.”

I agreed and we did just that. It seemed to work and John finally squeeked out something, “thanks” I think it was.

Well, we made it to LOSS, transferred over to the station where John was taken to the infirmary for treatment. I took Miss Green out to dinner since her traveling companion was was worth anything at the moment.

Actually, John wasn’t worth much for a long time. The tape HAD given him the pressure he needed, and the helmet fed him the air. I was told later that his balls had turned purple from all that pressure of the duct tape and he really wasn’t able to, well, uh, “perform” for a couple of months.

Which was OK, he was called back to Earth on the next shuttle. I heard he was shipped up to some tracking station in Northern Canada for the rest of his career.

Miss Green, on the other hand, finally told me her first name was “Cathy” and fell in love with Luna -- managing to get transferred here permanently.

I was pleased with that…

What? Was she THAT ‘Cathy’? You mean your grandmother, the woman I married the next year?

Yep, that was her, and, you know, the two of us were the ones who later took the idea of a skin-tight space suit to replace the clumsy air-filled ones Luna Corp was using on Luna. Now you know why we named our space suit company “Johnny Jump-Ups”.



"A Lunar Tan" 

"Jungle Juice High" 

"The Iron Midden" 

"Made On The Moon" 

"Cow Who Jumped On The Moon" 

"Gunfight at the Paris Corral" 

"The Long John Space Suit" 



(1,797 Words)