NASA to show world next generation spacesuit designs - Houston Chronicle

If NASA wants its astronauts to step foot on the moon by 2024, they’ll need spacesuits capable of supporting people as they explore the surface.

And on Tuesday afternoon, NASA officials will unveil two new spacesuit designs for the Artemis moon program. The event will be held at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., but it will be livestreamed here.

The American space agency has been suffering from a spacesuit problem for a number of years now. The suits worn by astronauts conducting spacewalks outside the International Space Station are 40 years old and have become increasingly difficult to fix.

This was highlighted by NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel in April.

“In its 1st quarterly meeting in March, the panel noted the challenges of maintaining an ambitious yet necessary (spacewalk) schedule for sustainment of ISS, while simultaneously managing a program for extending the suit-life of the aging (suits),” according to notes on the April public meeting. “It is increasingly apparent that the usable life of the (spacewalk) suits is limited.”

The 40-year-old suits are also problematic because they were designed at a time when women, who typically require different sizes than men, weren’t astronauts.

This came to a head in March, when NASA was forced to cancel its first, all-female spacewalk when the agency discovered that only one space suit on the station would fit the women’s smaller frames. NASA will try again for an all-female spacewalk later this month.

Second time’s a charm? NASA will try again for all female spacewalk this month forced the cancellation of the agency’s first all-female spacewalk earlier this year

In a news release announcing the spacesuit event Tuesday, NASA highlighted the new suits’ ability to “accommodate a broad range of astronaut sizes and features an improved fit, comfort and mobility for the lunar surface.”

One suit unveiled Tuesday will be for launch and re-entry aboard the Orion spacecraft, known as the Orion Crew Survival Suit, and one for exploring the surface, known as the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit or xEMU.

Over the years, NASA has been working on next generation space suits — and some of that work is conducted at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The work was refocused on the xEMU in 2016.

NASA plans to test walk the suits on the space station in 2023.

alex.stuckey@chron.com

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https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/NASA-to-show-world-next-generation-spacesuit-14521212.php

2019-10-15 09:00:00Z
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