An artist’s illustration of two suited crew members working on the lunar surface. The one in the foreground lifts a rock to examine it while the other photographs the collection site in the background. Credit: NASA
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. But what will astronauts be wearing when they take those steps on other worlds? Procuring giant rockets and futuristic spacecraft for Artemis has been the most well-publicized hurdle for NASA to overcome, but its efforts to design new spacesuits for the moon have proved equally challenging. Since 2007 the space agency has spent an estimated $420 million on new suit designs without actually fielding any. Finally, after all those unsuccessful attempts, last month NASA announced it has opted to outsource the work and has selected two companies to craft the next generation of haute couture for the high frontier.
Those companies—Axiom Space in Texas and Collins Aerospace in North Carolina—will each independently develop new spacesuits as part of NASA’s Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) contract. NASA has budgeted a total of $3.5 billion through 2034 for that combined work and plans to purchase its suits from the two companies as a service, which will free both to make and market additional suits for non-NASA commercial missions as well. Following demonstrations of the suits in Earth orbit, they will be used for the first Artemis landing, which is currently scheduled for 2025. That mission, dubbed Artemis III, will feature two astronauts, one man and one woman, who will don suits from one of the two companies to venture out onto the lunar surface. Whichever company isn’t chosen for that first landing will instead supply suits for later Artemis missions.
“This is a historic day for us,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in a press conference announcing the award on June 1. “History will be made with these suits when we get to the moon.”
Continue reading… “Astronauts Will Wear These Spacesuits on the Moon—And Maybe Mars, Too”
