The Creepiest Android by NASA
Text: Ganghyeon Paeg
Design: Ganghyeon Paeg
105×148mm
34p
Printed in May 2023
During the Cold War, in their race to land a man on the Moon, the United States conducted experiments beyond imagination. This book documents NASA’s 230-pound dummy, known as pDAD, created to test the pressure, mobility, and safety of spacesuits.
Designed to mimic the height, body shape, and joint torque of a typical human male, this machine could shake hands like a person—but it couldn’t stand or walk. Suspended by cables and operated remotely, it served as a human surrogate in countless experiments.
A spacesuit wasn’t just clothing. To understand how it moved, how much resistance it caused, and what pressure it exerted on the body, NASA replaced real humans with machines. In doing so, they created a human-shaped apparatus that stirred unsettling emotions—caught between technology and humanity, between experimentation and ethics.
The Creepiest Android by NASA unveils these hidden moments of 1960s space development, unfolding like a bizarre archive, a B-movie documentary, or the eerie remnants of a sci-fi dream.