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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."
Wven with the current USD-Sterling exchange rate.
Wait... did you mean that it "weighs" 39.2857 cloves?
Seriously; can we please try to use metric consistently, as NASA are finally doing themselves.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You know what would be even better than that, at least if you asked the astronauts?
In-suit coffee makers.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Why are all life support systems so temporary? Shouldn't there be some way to duplicate the process of the human body that transforms breathable air into exaust, but in the opposite direction? I could see something like that being very bulky and definatly not the next step, but perhaps the next leap should be towards an suit that maintains a balanced environment cycle by recycling human exausts.
Demented But Determined.
Nothing like setting out with two mutually exclusive goals.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
They won't be using the new suits on Mars (for any extended period of time, at least), and NASA damn well knows it.
For one thing, Mars has an atmosphere. Not directly breathable, of course... but not toxic either. So there's no need for Mars explorers to carry both oxygen AND "bulk" gas (like nitrogen) to give it volume and pressure. Instead, they can do what airplanes do... pressurize the outside air, warm it up, and inject small amounts of pure oxygen into it.
Likewise, a suit for outdoor use on Mars doesn't have to be pressurized beyond respiratory needs, or even airtight. Think: what would you wear to safely go outside at the South Pole in the middle of winter when it's -100C outside and windy. It needs to be highly insulated, and probably incorporate electric or chemical heat... but doesn't need the sheer bulk of moonsuits and EVA suits. If a Mars suit were torn, you might end up with a nasty case of frostbite, but as long as you were able to hook up to a good power and oxygen source you'd probably make it home with treatable injuries.
I fully expect to see NASA testing suits in Antarctica within a decade, both to get practical user evaluations of prototype designs AND solve a few nasty problems we have TODAY down there (if something goes wrong at the South Pole midwinter that requires outdoor travel, right now it's VERY dangerous to go outside there). Antarctica is nowhere near as cold, but I see lots of potential for spinoff technologies down there (like the iBot vs Segway).
I'm not sure if the poster was being serious or not, but imo there may be something to the idea in any case. The current generations are accustomed after dozens of space operas to seeing what amounts to "bling in space" on their fictional astronauts. The real thing and NASA seem stodgy and dull by comparison. Catching the imagination of the masses today is not going to happen with stuff that looks like the 60s. The spacesuits are one area where it might pay dividends to (quietly) approach apparel designers to get some ideas, if these can be reconciled with the safety and utility that must always come first. Even some gratuitous high tech looking items might be useful for marketing. These needn't even necessarily go up in the spacecraft, just demo it on the ground.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
"NASA wants to make the new spacesuit usable for launch, at the space station and on the moon and Mars."
There's one little problem with this. A suit designed for vacuum won't work properly on Mars. The Apollo suits (and STS/ISS EVA suits) use a form of insulation that will cause major user overheating in Mars' atmosphere. Also, most proposed Mars suits would use a life support system more like SCUBA tanks than current spacesuits, extremely low-power, easily re-filled and simple to maintain. It's more than just swapping out the upper parts of the suit based on task, some of what the article proposes won't work. The fundamental differences in environments will seriously hinder that plan.
Another issue is that for a single-suit strategy this means that the astronauts coming back from the Moon will be bringing their filthy suits back with them. This means several days of breathing the dust, plus the dust will saturate the Orion capsule's cabin. Not a good plan for a reusable vehicle.
Some of these issues can be resolved, others are just the different natures of the planets. Can tech developed for lunar exploration help with Mars? Sure, but it's not going to be the same spacesuits across all uses. Interfaces, communications, maybe parts of the life support pack, materials and assembly techniques will find crossover. The thing you don't want is to land on Mars only to realize that the vacuum-insulation in your suits is totally wrong and you can't do EVA without overheating. Even the difference between orbital suits and the lunar suits are huge, they are all different environments.
The right suit for Mars is based, IMHO, around Mechanical Counter-Pressure (MCP) principals instead of constant-volume balloon suits. The MIT "BioSuit" and NASA's old Space Activity Suit are excellent examples. MCP suits (and SCUBA-type air supply) are the only current approaches that can lead to sub-100lb (~40kg for you metrics) suits for Mars exploration. The only spacesuit concept that might work across environments would be a Newtsuit-type hard suit, and even then it's going to be heavy.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I've always thought the skintight model was the way to go, if you really wanted to colonize zero g or any of the planets. The hardshell suit is just too complex and expensive. I wish NASA had the money to spend on some engineering studies again. Or that we had any imaginative engineers left in that field. NASA has been a trucking company for too long.
I dunno about the actual work done on the skintight suits. Divers wear pretty tight outfits, and they manage somehow. Has any engineering been done in the last twenty years? As you say, new material are available.
With a skintight suit, you could throw on a "parka" in the freezing shade, or wear a beadouin's cloak in the harsh sunlight. On Mars, you could toss on a really well insulated snowsuit and some good boots. In contruction zones in zero g or the moon, you could wear some sports armor to guard your knees and elbows.
A skintight would be a lot less fatiguing to wear, be lighter to carry, leaks aren't the spectacular death that hardshell wearers worry over, and importantly, you can turn yor head. And if it were comfortable enough to wear full time, explosive decompression of the ship or habitat would be handled by slapping down your visor rather than, oh, dying 'cause it takes 90 minutes to suit up.