Scientist. Engineer. Astronaut. These are the careers most often associated with space. But there’s another activity far older than the history of human spaceflight, yet equally vital to today’s missions: the humble craft of sewing.

When Jeanne Wilson was seven, her mother taught her to sew. By age nine, Wilson was designing and making dolls’ clothes. Ten years later, in 1969, she was one of several seamstresses at ILC Dover who made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s spacesuits for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. (Learn 50 fascinating facts about the Apollo missions to the Moon.)

“My sister worked at a company called Playtex, which at the time was associated with ILC Dover,” says Wilson. “She was making bras and girdles.”

The sturdy light, flexible materials designed for women’s undergarments turned out to be ideal for spacesuits too. Wilson’s sister told her about an opportunity to work on spacesuits for the new Apollo mission astronauts. “I’d just turned 19, so I was very young. But I was so excited.”

You might also like:

• Apollo in 50 numbers: The cost

• Why your blood would boil in space

• The female astronauts who never saw space

Wilson left a job sewing suitcases. “That was production, so every thing was fast,” she says. “And then I came to ILC to work on the Apollo spacesuits and everything was very slow. Every time you sewed a seam, it had to be inspected, it had to be checked, because of the importance of what we were doing.”

The training included learning how to read blueprints, working with engineers and precision sewing using newly designed threads and multiple delicate layers of fine fabrics.