This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it workâfor YOU.
NASA Takes Grassroots Approach To Future Spacesuits, Aviation Week
“There are spacesuits. And then there are spacesuits.”
“NASA’s most successful have been very much safety- and mission-driven. Some have been worn inside a spacecraft during launch and entry in case of decompression, to enable mission abort and astronaut rescue.”
Comments are closed.
NASA Watch: Your support is needed, support independent journalism.
Thank you for whatever support you can provide. We recently launched this upgraded website which will allow us to expand our coverage. But the design and hosting come at cost, as does adding new services. We're also going looking to add new journalists as we expand.
We'll send a verification code to %EMAIL%.
Might be nice, before they go too far down the rabbit hole, to have a concise and growing plan for what exactly we will be doing on the Moon, before designs are made across the board, suits, vehicles, structures, rockets, etc., are developed.
The article does mention (past the paywall) that NASA “must decide what activities the astronauts will pursue during the 2024 return” before they can really design the suits. However, I don’t think we know enough about working on the lunar surface to know what, exactly, we will be doing on the Moon. This probably calls for a flexible approach, until we’re further up the learning curve. Even if we can say, for example, that we’d want to mine lunar ice from permanently shadowed craters, we don’t know what that would involve. Will they need shovels? Seriously, how much of the work would require an EVA and how much could be done inside a pressurized vehicle? Or by teleoperation?
But it looks like they are making one big mistake (in my opinion.) It apparently, they want to use the same suit, from the waist up, for orbital, lunar and martian work. Between different gravities and different thermal environments, I don’t think that’s viable.
“I don’t think that’s viable”
Are you taking issue with the notion of shared parts in general? Or, possibly concluding that the function overlap amongst the environments that you list are too dissimilar?
I don’t think it’s a problem to reuse as much hardware as possible. The difficulty comes in what compromises have to be made from the ideal components to the components you have on hand. Going between in-space and lunar use we have good experience (though a lot is historical), but between Martian surface and current suits we have none. So component reuse will require a lot of thought and testing until we’re sure it works.
Shared parts and modularity doesn’t bother me. That offers some nice flexibility, and even for a particular application, allows for flexibility in maintenance and operations. It’s the different environments I was thinking of. I mentioned gravity and thermal issues. And it makes sense for lower body mobility (which is one of the planned applications), since you don’t need much for free fall work, but surface work involves a lot of walking and bending.
In terms of gravity, I don’t think many people realize how heavy the current suits are. The EMU they use on the space station masses 145 kg. On Earth, that weighs 319 pounds. On the Moon, that would be 53 pounds, and on Mars, 121 pounds. I’m not sure if that includes the usual toolkit, but even if it does, that’s a whole lot. In free fall, that’s a moderately annoying inertia and momentum problem, and one we’ve demonstrably learned how to deal with. On the Moon, that’s a problem for serious surface work, but it’s probably not an insurmountable one. For surface work on Mars, a 121 pound suit would be a catastrophe. So cutting down on weight is a really big design driver for a Mars suit, but not for a lunar or orbit one.
At the same time, the thermal environment of Mars is pretty benign. In space or on the Moon, the outside temperatures range from very, very cold to very, very hot. And they can switch from one to the other, depending on whether the astronaut is in direct sunlight or in the shadow of the Earth or a large boulder. On Mars, the extremes range from very cold to (on a summer heat wave) highs of about what we’d call room temperature. And those extremes aren’t seen over short times; they are winter, nighttime lows to summer, daytime highs. Over the course of an eight-hour EVA, the range is much less. That makes a big difference for thermal design, and in the current suits, that’s complicated, massive and water-consuming. Trying to find a solution which works for space, the Moon and Mars isn’t going to be easy, and it takes away potential for the weight of a suit on Mars.
Too little, too late. Of course, they could always pay the Russians to build some suit-port compatible Orlan/Kretchet suits. Why not?
Begs the Question would Russians even know how now ! They might be able to pull 50 out of storage and sell them too you at a greatly inflated cost however ! I would not be surprised if SpaceX had a design 3/4 done !
The suit soft goods and systems would all need looking at, but the hard components should be either stock items or replicable. And the gloves *must* be current in terms of manufacturing capability. Perhaps the answer is to outsource to China…
I didn’t see dust mitigation mentioned in the article as a design consideration. I wonder if they have already concluded that no material or design will make a noticeable difference. I’m sure there are ways it can dealt with in the airlock but you would think minimizing how much is brought inside would be a first step.
It’s mentioned, but very briefly. At one point, there is a list of all the sorts of environmental issues that make surface and orbital work different. Dust is on it. They do say the hard upper torso will be something astronauts climb in from a hatch on the back. There is an old idea to simply mate such a hatch to the lander/base/vehicle/whatever and never actually bring the suit inside. That mitigates dust issues, but I’m not sure how you could do routine maintenance on the suits.
Question for those in the know:
How many of the problems we see in HSF at NASA and contractors are due to a possible dearth of experienced middle managers? People that would keep the engineering talent engaged and focused?
How much of it could be attributed to the quality of the engineering talent coming out of the colleges?
I’d love to blame everything on Presidents, Congress and politicians, but much of it seems to be unrelated to them.
SpaceX seems to be doing fine, but itâs average age is way below NASA. And it was named in a recent poll of engineering graduates as the number one place to work (NASA was 5th). That may be the key issue, too many senior managers who micromanage and have been beaten down by the bureaucracy.
There are certainly better paying jobs for engineers graduating from college, and jobs with better career prospects. And NASA does, from what I’ve seen, attract a fair amount of dead weight. But they also attract a fair amount of really good people, so that may not be the problem.
I’ll toss out the technical knowledge and interests of middle and upper management. I think those jobs call for enough knowledge to understand the details and make informed decisions (no saying, “Just give me the big picture” or relying on largely content-free PowerPoint presentations), but can also pay attention to the big picture and not get bogged down in the details. Unfortunately, that’s a tough balancing act.
It will be interesting to see what types of lunar EVA suits SpaceX will order.
When SpaceX lands on the Moon, Then expect they will provide Lunar surface EVA suits produced in-house. The development of a Lunar EVA suit should have started a few years back if SpaceX wants to offer Lunar surface excursions around 2025.
Given the amount of money it takes to develop full EVA capable suits, SpaceX doesnât have the money to develop in house.
Same was said about developing a new rocket, including engines, a prediction that turned out a bit low.
I’m not sure about that. If memory serves, they outsourced both the Dragon 2 pressure suit and life support system. Although they may have taken it back in house without my hearing about it. SpaceX could certainly develop an EVA suit in house, but this isn’t really their sort of thing. It would take a fair amount of money to develop the capabilities and it has a limited market (unlike Starlink, which was also investing quite a bit to branch out.)
It’s interesting to note that Mr. Musk hasn’t actually said SpaceX was about colonizing Mars (or the Moon.) His public statements aren’t a marvel of clarity or consistency, but, as I understand it, he’s said SpaceX is a transportation company. They are aimed at getting the price of travel to Mars cheap enough that _someone_ could start a colony. That may mean that surface infrastructure (including suits) isn’t in their line of work.
AFAIK the current SpaceX IVA suit was developed in house.
Since there will be a future requirement to be able to do EVA from the Starship for inspections and repairs, a SpaceX space EVA suit is a must.
Unless there is someone working on a mass market Lunar excursion EVA suit there will be no tourist walking on the Moon anytime soon. SpaceX will try to fulfill that future market demand internally rather than out-sourcing to a outside vendor.
As I said, they originally had a contract to outsource development of an IVA suit, but they may have changed their minds without my having seen the press release.
It isn’t obvious to me that there will be a requirement for EVA inspection or repairs of Starship. I think it would be a good idea, but that would be a first (almost; post-Columbia Shuttle flights had the ability to do so, but it was never used, just tested.) Since I don’t know what SpaceX’s plans are, I’m willing to say I don’t know rather than guessing.
I’m not sure what your point was about lunar tourists and EVAs. If someone’s going to make money off tourists walking around on the Moon, sure, someone’s going to have to develop suits. But it doesn’t have to be SpaceX. They may be quite happy to provide the ride, and let someone else run the package tours. Or they might run them themselves, and outsource the infrastructure they aren’t set up to develop. Or do everything in house, which is how they build rockets. But we just don’t know. You’re saying “will” when what we actually know is “might” or (at best) “probably.”
NASA needs a helluvalot more than a new spacesuit. They have not even begun to work on a new lander. Even Orion is further away from a manned flight today than Apollo was away from a manned flight in 1965. The entire program is in front of them and at the rate NASA is going, they will not get there.
NASA is in a situation not dissimilar from that of the months surrounding Pres. Kennedy’s speech: they can’t even begin to design a lander, and not because the ability isn’t there, either. it certainly is.
It was more or less assumed, again in the early days, that Direct Ascent would somehow describe the mission that came to be LOR. I’m mentioning this because without this key decision, nothing can be done regarding a lander: too many different mission parameters. This explains the recent NASA interrogatory regarding lander designs, too.
So, here we are again, except that this time around NASA appears to favor LOR.
While technology moves on, new entrants bring considerable expertise to the effort. Rockets have become gargantuan; reliability is vastly improved; and going tail-first atop 100′ or so rocket now longer seems an insurmountable issue.
This time around NASA favors a peculiar kind of LOR in which the orbit is midway gravitationally between Earth and Moon. LOR was chosen in order to make the LM as small as possible while putting most of the energy into the ‘mothership’. This time because the Orion is underpowered (because it is based on the ESA ATV) and contains too little energy, the lander must contain more of the fuel for the descent and landing, and a lot more fuel for the lunar launch, ascent and orbital maneuvers to and from the Gateway. It requires a lot more fuel in the lander, a much bigger and heavier lander, and it makes the trip much more dangerous.
There is a bit of “function follows form” about that approach. And the same could be said of ISS and possibly the Shuttle. It also brings another phrase to mind: If your only tool is a hammer, a nail looks like the solution to every problem.
The current situation is a bit worse. The mandate in 1962 was to land someone on the Moon by the end of the decade (and return him safely to Earth, of course…) Today, it’s a 2024 landing _and_ a “sustainable” presence by 2028. Which means the lander can’t (or shouldn’t) be tailored to a few brief visits. To meet the 2028 goal, it needs to be evolvable into something more “sustainable.” (Whatever that means, since, if SLS is a part of the whole thing, that probably can’t mean financially sustainable.)