Where Are The #Moon2024 Lunar EVA Suits?
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NASA OIG: NASA’s Management and Development of Spacesuits
“NASA continues to manage an array of design and health risks associated with the EMUs used by ISS crew. In addition, only 11 of the 18 original EMU Primary Life Support System units – a backpack-like structure that performs a variety of functions required to keep an astronaut alive during a spacewalk – are still in use, raising concerns that the inventory may not be adequate to last through the planned retirement of the ISS. Given these issues, NASA will be challenged to continue to support ISS needs with the current fleet of EMUs through 2024, a challenge that will escalate significantly if Station operations are extended to 2028.
Despite spending nearly $200 million on NASA’s next-generation spacesuit technologies, the Agency remains years away from having a flight-ready spacesuit capable of replacing the EMU or suitable for use on future exploration missions. As different missions require different designs, the lack of a formal plan and specific destinations for future missions has complicated spacesuit development. Moreover, the Agency has reduced the funding dedicated to spacesuit development in favor of other priorities such as an in-space habitat.
After examining these spacesuit development efforts, we question NASA’s decision to continue funding a contract associated with the Constellation Program after cancellation of that Program and a recommendation made by Johnson Space Center officials in 2011 to cancel the contract. Rather than terminate the contract, NASA paid the contractor $80.8 million between 2011 and 2016 for spacesuit technology development, despite parallel development activities being conducted within NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems Division. Moreover, given the current development schedule, a significant risk exists that a next-generation spacesuit prototype will not be sufficiently mature in time to test it on the ISS prior to 2024. Finally, little schedule margin exists between anticipated delivery of the Orion Crew Survival System spacesuit in March 2021 and NASA’s current internal launch date of August 2021 for its first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit.”
Whenever they finally do the new suits, it’d be neat if they went for higher-pressure ones that don’t require pre-breathing, and allow for more flexibility (particularly in the hands and waist).
I just went through that OIG report from last April. They are still trying to come up with something which allows both higher pressure and more flexibility. There are solutions out there, but I suppose they are too unconventional. But that’s typical of an OIG report. They aren’t engineers and technicians, so the technical side of the report tends to be summarizing what they were told about the issues. On the management side, the report made the whole effort look pretty unfocused.
There are a whole bunch of issues, there probably isn’t a good way to solve all of them at once, and suits tend to be destination specific. Thermal issues, for example, are totally different in orbit, on the Moon and on Mars. So is gravity (and therefore how much mass is acceptable for an astronaut to do useful work) and needs for flexibility (the current suits are designed for orbit, and they have just about zero lower body mobility.) That probably means you can’t come up with a good design which works for use in orbit, on lunar surface and on Mars. Since they don’t know which one to design for, it looks like they’re just working on the pieces, not an integrated, flight-ready design. Let alone the actual flight hardware.
Well now they have a little more focus.
In fact, based on your comment, it sounds like NASA had no clear objective regarding suits (except possibly ISS suits). It remains to be seen if they can execute on the directive but at least there is a goal.
NASA could always ask the folks from Hawthorne if they can upgraded their spacesuit to Lunar environment standard by 2024.
The 2 main upgrades required by the SX spacesuit for Lunar surface environment is durability and thermal management.
Durability as to be able to handle the abrasive Regolith dust and micro-meteorite protection.
Some sort of thermal management is needed for operations on the Lunar surface during daylight and darkness.
One upgrade path is to added lightweight non-pressurized protective outer garments to their current spacesuit along with a combo life support and thermal management system installed in a backpack.
If SX is planning to send folks to the Lunar surface they must have consider some EVA apparel options. After all you need actual stevedores to unload cargo on the Lunar surface.
No, I’m afraid it is much, much more difficult. The suits SpaceX has are designed for very short duration use during a launch or landing emergency, not seven or eight hours of use independent from the spacecraft. No requirements for flexibility or movement, other than handling instruments directly in front of the astronaut. The list goes on. A pressure suit for safety during launch, should the capsule loose pressure, is as far from a surface suit as a compact car is different from a truck. It isn’t like you can just make some simple changes and turn a SmartCar into a Kenworth 18 wheeler.
Wouldn’t be too sure about the lack of flexibility or mobility in the SX spacesuit from photos released so far.
It seems to be more than a mere pressure suit with linkage from high altitude flightsuits.
Regardless SX will need some sort of EVA suits for Lunar and Mars if they are sending people to those destinations plus a space EVA suit if the Starship enters service.
SpaceX will need EVA suits at some point, and your description of the ones they have is correct. It’s a pressure suit, not an EVA suit. I guess I shouldn’t have said flexibility. The SpaceX suit does look pretty flexible, but it’s flexible in the wrong way. In vacuum, a suit will expand to its maximum volume. That can mean the hands will be open with the fingers extended, the legs and arms will be straight, etc. And it will take the astronaut’s muscle fighting the internal pressure of the suit to change that. EVA suits have joints which are designed to have the same volume no matter how they are bent or unbent, while requiring little effort to move. That’s a complicated (and often mass intensive) design, and not something the design for a pressure suit would bother with.
Yes, also Blue Origin and Boeing are doing their own pressure suits.
In the Smithsonian, they just need a little fixing up. 🙂
LOL, funny. Unfortunately even if they were in pristine condition (they surely aren’t after all these years), they were all custom made for each individual astronaut. That was one of the reasons they could be so light. They don’t have all of the joints that a space shuttle EMU has in order to accommodate different arm lengths, leg lengths, and etc. All those joints and seals add mass.
No, in fact they were in the process of rotting away, literally, and only saved in the nick of time.
https://www.smithsonianmag….
A Moonwalk Did Not Destroy Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit, Now Time Won’t Either
“But the curators knew they were racing against time. The suit’s synthetic textiles were degrading due to age and the environment, and the materials were off gassing, contributing to the decay. Plus, spacesuits such as Armstrong’s “weren’t designed with the idea that anybody was going to come back and use it 50 years later,” says Adam Bradshaw, an exhibits specialist at the museum.”
This is also interesting.
“The suit is also still covered in lunar dust, called regolith, from the knees down—despite NASA’s cleaning and the years of non-climate-controlled exposure. “Lunar regolith is very aggressive,” says Lewis, noting that the fine powdery substance “cannot be shaken off, and cannot be dry-cleaned off.”
When NASA decides it will develop new EVA suits for the Moon they might want to touch base with the folks at the Smithsonian who seem to understand those suits better than NASA, or at least the current generation at NASA.
Even if the Smithsonian figured out how to preserve those suits, I doubt they are in usable condition. There is a difference between being a usable museum piece and being usable for its intended use. Just go to Portsmouth and look at the ships there. The HMS Victory, Warrior and Mary Rose will never sail again. But the restoration experts made sure they will survive as museum ships for the indefinite future.
What the folks at the Smithsonian could tell NASA something about is long-term preservation. Even a good Mars space suit might mass 50 kg, and that means you really wouldn’t want to be shipping new ones from Earth on a regular basis. Maintaining the ones on site would be quite valuable, and museum experts on restoration and preservation might have something to contribute.
I don’t think they would even allow the original astronauts to try them on given how delicate they are today. But what they learned about conserving those spacesuits should be useful when NASA designs the next generation ones. Especially since few if any of the designers are still around.
Sure, if long term use and survivability of the suits is important. But that gets back to why NASA needs spacesuits. Is it because the number of existing ones is getting low, and more of the same will be needed to keep ISS running until 2028? Or for short visits to the Moon? Or for astronauts at a permanent base on Mars, where suits might be passed on from astronaut to astronaut for decades (without being shipped back to Earth for maintenance and recertification)?
If you can answer that, I might have something more concrete to say about the folks at the Smithsonian and how they could contribute. But, if you could answer that, it would also solve many of the problems NASA human spaceflight is in.
Of course that requires NASA to decide where they are going. 🙂
However there is also the private sector. For now they are just developing spacesuits to wear inside the spacecraft, but its only a matter of time before they will need EVA suits and spacesuits for the Moon.
Yeah, lunar regolith is extremely abrasive due to the fact that there is no effective mechanism on the moon to weather rocks and dust into something smooth. So the regolith is extremely sharp and abrasive and it was really tearing up the suits even on the short EVAs of Apollo.
Newer suits will likely need materials that keep out as much dust as possible. They’ll likely need an outer later that can easily be replaced when it becomes worn in order to prevent dust from infiltrating the next layer of the suit.
They are in California at a private enterprise known as ‘SpaceX’.
We’ll need new suits. The space shuttle EMU suits are not designed for use on the moon. For starters, they’re very heavy. There are other details too, which I can’t remember, which make them unsuitable for lunar EVA. Astronautix.com has a blurb about this, but goes into no detail as to why they’re not suitable.
I do remember this was discussed ages ago on the sci.space Usenet Newsgroups. Hard to believe it’s now about 25 years later and we’re still using shuttle EMUs on ISS (with a few minor tweaks for ISS duty).
It showed up on sci.space (actually sci.space.tech, I think) all those years ago because of a student senior research project at Berkeley. The moderator (George Herbert) and a regular participant (me) of that news group were both involved. So, naturally, we did post on the subject to those newsgroups. And that would have been in 1991, which is a hair more than 25 years ago. (Sorry, I’m feeling sensitive about that, since my 50th birthday is tomorrow…)
But, since you mention it, yes. It is very frustrating to see this. People outside NASA did list off the limitations of past and existing suits for lunar and martian work. And their unsuitability for use on any sort of sustainable mission, in terms of maintenance and consumables. Actually, that Berkeley senior group research project wasn’t outside of NASA: It was run by an NRC fellow working at Ames, and we presented the results in a day-long meeting at Ames. We offered some ideas of how to improve on that. Some of them were probably bad, but I think some of them were good. But it looks like those ideas have just gone off to the great bit bucket in the sky.
As one example, I was the one who noted that the current carbon dioxide scrubbers are one-use-only disposables, and that this would be a logistical nightmare for a Mars mission. For a modest mass penalty, you can use a different chemical which can be recycled about a dozen times before becoming inefficient. That research was definitely a waste of my time, since I’m probably the only one in the world who remembers it, and I suspect someone at JSC will eventually have to put in a lot of time and effort reinventing it.
I just turned 50 last week, so I feel you on the age thing. Thanks for adding a lot of detail to my fuzzy memory. In 1991, I was finishing up my last co-op session and starting my senior year at Purdue.
It really is sad that NASA has been spending money over the last 25+ years on improved EVA suits and yet we’re still using the tweaked space shuttle EMUs on ISS. One would have thought that ISS would have been the perfect place to test new suits.
Belated Happy Birthday!
I’m tempted to say it’s appalling, not sad. The EMU was designed with the Shuttle in mind. That means it was designed for essentially all maintenance to be done on the ground. It goes up, is used once or twice, comes back down and gets handed over to a ground crew. The whole concept of leaving an EMU up on a space station for years, and using it many times over those years, was totally alien to what it was designed for. I’m afraid this is another example of NASA’s tendency to neglect evolutionary or incremental improvements, and focus on dramatic, order of magnitude improvements.
Happy Birthday! Welcome to the WFAC – Wisdom From Age Club 🙂
Thanks. I guess, as a college girlfriend predicted, I’m making a smooth transition from an angry young man to a grumpy old man.
Where is the source of Gert laying out his 2024 moon plan?
“We will have EVA suits, get out, and do meaningful work.”
I would really like to know what the “meaningful work” is given that basic science on lunar geology does nothing to make life for humanity on Earth better. What other “meaningful” is he or anyone possibly thinking about?