The suits, supplied by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace, will be used in NASA’s upcoming Artemis lunar missions and will protect space travellers from micrometeoroids, moon dust and even vomit
Sooner or later, humans will set foot on the moon again—perhaps by the middle of this decade if NASA’s Artemis program proceeds as planned. And beyond that, public or private crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s or 2040s no longer seem solely confined to science fiction.
Troubled Development The selection of these two companies followed a 2021 call put out by NASA for new spacesuit proposals because the existing Extravehicular Mobility Unit suit used on the International Space Station is too bulky and rigid for lunar-surface forays. More than 40 companies registered their interest, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, but only Axiom and Collins submitted finished proposals by the December 2021 deadline.
The exact designs of the two companies’ spacesuits are still under wraps. The selection process dictated that both of them had to show their suits could meet about 80 requirements set by NASA, however. “We then left it open to them to decide what their design looked like,” Kearney says. These requirements relate to the unique objectives of the Artemis missions and their intended difference from the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Reflecting in part NASA’s objective for Artemis to send the first people of color and the first women to the moon, the new suits must, in a sense, also be “one-size-fits-all”—capable of interchangeable use across multiple missions by a diverse group of astronauts with a wide range of physiques.
The suits must also remain functional after being left on the lunar surface—initially for 210 days as per NASA’s requirements but eventually for as long as three years. This could allow astronauts on future missions to revisit previous landing sites and reuse the suits left behind rather than having to bring their own. “Depending on the landing sites, we could be able to go and collect and reuse them,” Kearney says.
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