Fifty years after the end of the Apollo missions, NASA is set on returning to the moon with its Artemis program. Along with designing rockets and spacecraft for the journey, there will be a need for new spacesuits for lunar exploration and tasks. NASA has spent 15 years and $420 million on designing new suits, but now have contracted the work out to two aerospace companies that will be able to build on NASA's existing research. Those companies are Axiom Space in Texas and Collins Aerospace in North Carolina, which will each work on the suits independently. NASA has budgeted $3.5 billion over the next 12 years for the suits. These new spacesuits will need to be much tougher and more adaptable than the suits Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo astronauts wore to walk on the moon's surface. We've learned a lot about space since then. Dan Burbank, former astronaut and senior tech fellow at Collins Aerospace, explains one of the required innovations.
Both Axiom and Collins are designing their suits to be rear-entry. This means that rather than putting a suit on within an airlock and then exiting a spacecraft, as is done with spacesuits currently on the ISS, these new designs could be attached externally to a special NASA-prototyped airlock called a suit port. “You could literally back into a hatch, bond the outer portion of your [suit] to this structure and then open the hatch,” Burbank says. This helps reduce the amount of potentially harmful lunar regolith, or moon dust, that is tracked back inside. Using a suit port “eliminates the regolith hazard,” Burbank says. “None of the exterior of the suit sees the interior of the spacecraft.”
This brings up a picture of a landing craft with suits attached around the outside as it lands. What will the aliens think? There are lots more requirements for the new suits. Read about the suits and how these companies plan to address the mission's needs at Scientific American. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: NASA)
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