Season 2, Episode 1 of The Space and Science Show #AskAbby series
Presented by TheMarsGeneration.org

How to make an astronaut costume for Halloween? 

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We’re back! In the Season 2 premiere of #AskAbby, Astronaut Abby answers the question: “How do you make an astronaut costume for Halloween?” Are you looking for inspiration for your trick-or-treating costume? Do you know you want to be an astronaut, but don’t want to spend a ton of money? Looking to excite your child’s interest in space? Find out how to make an amazing astronaut costume that’s easy, fun, as well as inexpensive to make by watching the Season 2 premiere of the #AskAbby Space and Science Show!

Includes answers to questions including: How do you make a paper mache astronaut helmet? How can you make a jetpack out of soda bottles? Do astronauts really have jetpacks? How much does the typical NASA EVA (extravehicular activity suit) suit cost? How can you make an inexpensive EVA suit for Halloween? Whats a manned maneuvering unit? What’s the most important part of an astronaut costume? Lots of space puns included…as always!

If you’ve built the costume, tweet, post, or send a picture or video of your costume to @AstronautAbby or with the hashtag #AskAbby for a chance for your costume to be FEATURED on our page.

Tune in for new releases of The Space and Science Show #AskAbby series and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel here so you don’t miss an episode!

Transcription of HOW TO MAKE AN ASTRONAUT COSTUME

Hi everyone and welcome to Season 2 of #AskAbby! We’re kicking things off with something extra fun and dare I say…space-tacular!

I’m going to show you how to make the best astronaut costume ever! — based on an EVA suit, which is an Extravehicular Activity Suit — or the big white ones that you see astronauts wearing when they’re doing spacewalks.

So this will actually be the first time that I’ve made an astronaut costume. Crossing my fingers that it goes stellar. And that I’ll be the star of my neighborhood when I go trick-or-treating.

*Show Intro*

Hi everyone, I’m Astronaut Abby, an aspiring astronaut with the goal to be the first person to walk on Mars. Welcome to AskAbby, where I answer all of your questions about space and science.

Since Halloween is right around the corner, we’re all probably thinking about costumes, right?

For all of those future space travelers out there, being an astronaut is probably pretty high on your list.

So for less than $50, some household items, and about 2.5 hours, I’m going to show you how to make the most out-of-this-world astronaut costume on your block (and dare I say on the internet)!

And parents, instead of just buying a costume, this is a great way to continue to ignite your child’s passion for STEM while having a fun and educational experience making it together.

Here are the materials that you’ll need to make this costume:

• Silver, red and black duct tape
• Black pipe-cleaners
• A black pom pom
• A balloon — and you want to make sure that your balloon is bigger than the head of the person who’s going to be wearing this costume because this is going to become their helmet
• White paint
• Fire-colored tissue paper
• A white protective Tyvek suit
• A bowl to do your paper mache in
• Poster-board
• Scissors, of course
• Newspaper
• Plain white paper
• A paint brush
• A glue gun
• White glue
• Two 2-liter soda bottles — empty
• Paper towels for cleanup
• And some water
• And of course we can’t forget the most important part of a space suit, which is patches.
• You’ll probably want to go and get some cool space patches, and then also some NASA patches, or whatever other space agency you want to support. And of course, remember to go to TheMarsGeneration.org and pick up one of our Mars Gen patches to put on your costume.

The first thing that we’re going to make is a helmet because there’s no oxygen in space. And that’s a little bit important.

The first step in making our helmet is to blow up the balloon so that we have a base for it. You’re going to want to blow your balloon up to slightly larger than the head of the person who will be wearing the costume.

Now we’ll prop our balloon up in a small bowl to keep it still while we’re doing our paper mache.

Now that we have the base for our helmet, we’re going to go ahead and make the helmet out of paper mache. For our mixture we’ll be using equal parts water and glue, and then dipping the strips of newspaper into it.

So you’ll just want to pour a little bit of glue into a bowl, and then pour an equal amount of water into the bowl. And go ahead and mix it up really well. You want to mix it until you can’t really see any more lumps of glue. Alright, there we go.

And then we’re going to take our strips of newspaper and soak them in our paper mache mixture. Make sure to get the paper totally covered, nice and gooey and soggy, and place it over your helmet balloon.

Once you have two or three layers of newspaper paper mache on your balloon, you’ll want to go ahead and take some strips of white paper and do the same thing, and cover your balloon in one layer of white paper strips, like so. This will make sure that it’s a lot easier to paint your white paint on without the newspaper showing underneath. Once you finish your paper mache, you have to wait for it to dry, which could take up to six hours.

Once your paper mache has dried, you’re going to go ahead and paint it white. Just get a nice layer of white paint over your entire helmet.

Now that we’ve painted it, we have to wait for the paint to dry. While we wait for that, I’m going to go shave my beard.

Now that all that the paint on our helmet has dried, we’re going to go ahead and cut a faceplate out so we can see out of it.

Since I’ll be using an exacto knife or a sharp pair of scissors, I’m going to need some adult help. Can I get an adult in here?!

NICOLE
*appears out of thin air*
Abby!

ABBY
Woah, Mom! How did you get here so fast, all the way from Minnesota?!

NICOLE
It was magic of course!

ABBY
Aww, wow! Well will you go ahead and cut this for me.

NICOLE
*grabs balloon and with a puff of smoke the helmet is cut*
Ta-da! I did it! And I added a microphone using a pipe-cleaner and pom pom.

ABBY
Wow, Mom! You’re the best!

NICOLE
I know!

ABBY
Now go away.

NICOLE
*leaves*

ABBY
This is AskAbby, not ask Mom!

So now that we have the mouthpiece on our helmet that’s really important so that we can talk to ground control.

*Into microphone* Uh, excuse me, Houston? I think we have a problem. This costume is just too awesome.

Now we’re going to make our rocket-fueled jet pack — which isn’t completely accurate. When astronauts are in space, they don’t actually use rockets to move around. They use something called an MMU, or a Manned Maneuvering Unit, which is like a backpack that they wear that’s full of compressed gas. And when they expel that compressed gas, it propels them in the direction that they want to go.

However, fire looks so cool, so we’re going to use that instead for this costume. To do so, I’ve got three layers of tissue paper here, our red, orange and yellow — or whatever colors you want to use for your fire. And I’m going to go ahead and just roll ‘em up like this. Doesn’t matter if they’re particularly tight. Once they’re rolled up, roughly in the middle, take that and scrunch it together. Take your scissors and cut each of the sides of your jetpack flames.

Now that we’ve got our flame strips cut, we’re going to go ahead and put them into our 2-liter bottle. And you can just separate out your flames a little bit if you want.

Okay, so that’s how we’re going to make the fire on our jetpacks. But now we need to make our jetpacks look cool and futuristic, and to do that, we’re going to use silver metallic duct tape. So you’ll want to cut strips of silver duct tape off, and then wrap them around your bottle. So you’ll keep doing that, wrapping strips of duct tape around your bottle, until you have a fully covered product like this one.

Once you’ve finished covering your rockets in silver duct tape, we’re going to connect them to our poster board using black duct tape. Ta-da!

Now we’re going to put the decorations onto our EVA suit. But, instead of using a real EVA suit, which would cost two to twelve million dollars, we’re going to go ahead and use this white personal protection garment from Amazon.

EVA suits usually have red lines around the waist and the arms of the astronaut, so that’s what we’re going to put on ours. We’re going to use our red duct tape to simulate that. So just cut off some strips of red duct tape, and we’ll go ahead and put those on the arms of our suit, and also around the waist.

And now for the most important part of our astronaut costume, which isn’t the life support or the helmet or the jetpack. No, it is patches.

So we have some cool patches here, and we’re going to just use a hot glue gun to stick ‘em on. Alternatively, if you don’t have patches, which you can order pretty easily online, you can color them on with markers or with paint.

Now that we’ve finished all the pieces of our costume, we just need to assemble it. This costume is easiest to put together if someone is already wearing the white part of the suit. If only I had someone wearing it. Huh.

EMILY
*Jumps on screen wearing the space suit* Ta-da!

ABBY
Hey Emily!

EMILY
Hey Abby!

ABBY
Oh perfect! Alright, so I’m going to go ahead and put the jetpack on Emily using our silver duct tape.

*Abby tapes jetpack onto Emily*

The great thing about the silver duct tape is that putting it on makes it look like you have straps of your jetpack. There you go!

EMILY
Yay!

ABBY
And now for the last piece, we’re going to put the helmet on! You ready?

EMILY
Yeah, I’m ready!

ABBY
*Places helmet on Emily*
There you go! Awww, isn’t she so cute?! You’re so cute!

EMILY
Glad to know. It’s so kawaii.

*Emily models costume*

So now we are done making our astronaut costume, which I think is pretty great. If you go ahead and make this costume, make sure to Tweet it at me, or Instagram it to me or Facebook it to me. So basically just tag me and the hashtag #AskAbby, and who knows, I might feature you on my page!

It was a lot of fun to make and it looks pretty darn cool, which we all know the cooler you look on Halloween, the more candy you get, right?

EMILY
Totally.

ABBY
This is true.

EMILY
How it works.

ABBY
So I think this is a pretty astronomical costume. Would you say so?

EMILY
*Laughs* I can’t with the puns.

ABBY
You might even say that it’s “out of this world.”

EMILY
Nooo.

ABBY
You want to know how you make a costume this cool?

EMILY
Noooo!

ABBY
You “plan-et”!

That’s all the time we have today for AskAbby. If you liked this segment, go ahead and click the thumbs up button and “like” us. And also subscribe to make sure that you see all of our future episodes coming out.

And if you have a question that you want to see answered on AskAbby, you can do so by Tweeting it to me with the hashtag #AskAbby, or by submitting it at TheMarsGeneration.org/AskAbby, which is linked below as always.

That’s all the time we have today for AskAbby. If you liked this segment, go ahead and click the thumbs up button and “like” us. And also subscribe to make sure that you see all of our future episodes coming out.

And if you have a question that you want to see answered on AskAbby, you can do so by Tweeting it to me with the hashtag #AskAbby, or by submitting it at TheMarsGeneration.org/AskAbby, which is linked below as always.

Want to join me in our goodbye catchphrase?

EMILY
I’d be glad to.

ABBY and EMILY
Until next time, farewell fellow travelers of spaceship Earth!