I made this model about a year ago. I’m finally trying to rig it and I can’t seem to figure out how to make the zipper on the space suit follow along. Parenting it to the rig always results in really really bad results (like zipper teeth going in all different directions). I also tried parenting a curve to the rig, but curves don’t seem to follow along with a rig. Any suggestions would be most helpful.
Can’t help with the rigging problem, but just wanted to say, I love your model! Always good to see a kerbal…alive! 
Maybe try apply all modifiers of the zip into meshes?
I know you would lost all the control and simplicity. But it’s seem to be onlyway.
Or my other guess is try move origin of the zip mesh and its curve to match with origin of the body meshes that influenced by the same bone.
Not sure if it help. But, let me know if it does.
Anyway, very detailed and impressive model!
I managed to sort through most of my rigging issues. Still need to fix a bunch of materials problems… I added some loop cuts and I think it stretched the textures a little… also I messed with the moon surface and I’m not happy with the results.
Well, if you’re familiar with advanced rigging stuff I advice you to use a combination of shrinkwrap constraint and damped/stretch to constraint. I’ve covered this with Cody Winshester in this topic : http://community.cgcookie.com/t/damped-track-and-stretch-to-constraints-use-tutorial/266/8
Otherwise, I would largely advise you to go for a deformation cage.
You should be able to find tutorial about this easily.
This is a very good way to rig characters with accessories.
Last thing is to have a perfect weight painting 
Hey thanks for those suggestions! I will look into those methods. What I ended up doing with the zipper was applying the curve modifier I used to model it and assigned weight to vertices in edit mode with the top and bottom of each tooth having different weights so they would stretch. It was tedious, but it looks convincing. After I did that I discovered the Hook modifier with the hose running from his backpack to his chest. I could have done something similar with the zipper and it probably would have been better.
Started work on some rocket parts. The story is he crashed landed and doesn’t even care.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]470754[/ATTACH]