05/28/2026
Some are born to sew spacesuits and pressurized softgoods. You might have seen her on CBS recently, or even on the runway — meet Sandra Roof.
Sandra is one of our Engineering Technicians specializing in spacesuit assembly and performance. Growing up, she learned to sew at only 5 years old from her mother and spent her childhood making her own clothes, building a deep, natural understanding of how materials fit, move, and interact. Her years as a high-fashion model sharpened that instinct further. When a garment fails on the runway, you know it instantly. It's that same embodied sense of how apparel performs on a living, moving body that she brings to building suits for space.
Drawn to ILC by the legacy of helping put a man on the Moon and the challenge of building the next generation spacesuit, Sandra started as a seamstress and worked her way up to Engineering Technician. Over nearly a decade, she has focused on the "softgoods" of the spacesuit, the incredibly complex layers of fabric and materials that create a mobile, pressurized environment. She helps ensure these life-critical systems are built to exact specifications and ready to protect astronauts in the vacuum of space.
Working on the next-generation spacesuit isn't just designing on a computer. It's refining, iterating, and testing — and testing means wearing. In the vacuum of space, internal pressure makes the suit stiffer, requiring the design and manufacture of mobility joints critical for optimal functionality. Sandra puts the suit on herself, working with her team on joint mobility and manual pressure testing to feel exactly where the suit resists movement. The person who builds it is also the one who tests its limits. That direct feedback loop is how ILC ensures its gear moves with the explorer, not against them.
People often ask Sandra if it's scary to be inside a pressurized suit. "Not when you know the people who built it," she says.
Sandra bridges the gap between technical drawings and finished products every day, translating engineering specifications into something a human body can actually wear and rely on. That combination of lifelong craft and precision engineering is rare. At the end of the day, we aren't just sending products into orbit, we are sending a piece of our collective hard work and a promise to bring our explorers home safely.
