NASA Engineers Work on New Spacesuits

NotCoward writes "In labs at Johnson Space Center, away from the buzz about NASA's new spaceship and its new missions to the moon and Mars, a group of engineers are plodding away at another piece of the puzzle: spacesuits. Astronaut apparel has evolved over the decades from Mercury's aluminum foil-looking outfits to the bulky, 275-pound whites now used on jaunts outside the space station. While it's too early in the process to know how the new space suits will look, the space agency is hoping to make new suits both high-tech and low-maintenance."

Comments

Re:Liquid Oxygen

[Anonymous Coward]

The chemistry of that seems a little difficult. Human metabolism works by a redox reaction with atmospheric oxygen as the oxidizer. That's convenient for us as we don't have to store an oxidizer in our tissues, only the fuel.

As in any redox reaction, the exhaust -- CO2 in this case -- is a lower energy state. Moving the process in the opposite would require quite a bit of energy. In a small device like a space suit, the only practical source of large amounts of energy is a chemical reaction. So now we're back to needing an oxidizer anyway. Maybe you could find one more convenient than oxygen, but the inefficiencies of the process are likely to undo any gains.

Re:Mars hyperbole

[Gruturo]

Are you joking?

Mars' atmosphere is a lot thinner than Earth's, and the pressure at surface level is only 0.6% of Earth's. Even if supplied with breathable air, and heating, you wouldn't survive in the martian environment due to the extremely low pressure. The suits *have* to be airtight.

Re:No User Servicable Parts Inside

[GospelHead821]

You're neglecting the third corner of the triangle. They can design a high-tech, low-maintenance space suit, but it will be monstrously expensive.

Re:Fishbowl helmets yet?

[Rei]

Some designs under consideration are very sci-fi like. Even retro sci-fi. Currently, we use pressure suits. These are suits with an inner bladder that contains the air, and an outer layer that helps retain the bladder and conform it to the right shape. While they're designed to make it so that the suit is constant volume (because changing the volume takes extra work), you still waste a lot of energy bending the suit. There are two radical departures from this.

1) Hard shell: These suits look like sci-fi powered armor, minus the power. There's already a few suits like this used for deep-sea diving. A hard shell suit is a rigid exoskeleton with smooth-sliding ball joints. The joints are the hardest point of the design, as you can't afford for them to leak, but you can't afford for them to resist your motion much, either. It takes many joints for a good suit to not constrain the wearers' motion too heavily.

2) Skintight: Like in retro sci-fi where everyone walks around in spandex, this is actually a serious design. The tight suit itself provides direct pressure on the body. Even better, the fabric is slightly porous so that you can sweat into the vaccuum of space, so you don't need cooling. There's one big downside that has prevented widespread adoption of such suits: they're currently almost impossible to get on or off. Such a suit, to be practical, would need to be made of a fabric that can change size when exposed to a certain stimulus (electricity, air pressure, etc).