In 1970, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Centre was forced to address a tricky new issue in the realm of women in space: the validity of pants in the workplace. 

Women and pants have a strange relationship throughout the 20th century, and further back, too, though for the moment we aren’t going to get into Joan of Arc wearing men’s armour. Pants — or trousers or slacks — began the last century as men’s clothing, but it wasn’t long before exceptions started to appear in the form of athletic wea