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

If they don't do it absolutely right it will kill

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the darker aspects of the Apollo program that most are not aware of is the high casualty rate among spacesuit testers back in the day. I took a class on aerospace engineering back in the day to get to listen to folks from NASA every week and watch movies on the building of the Apollo program, and I still recall the movies showing development of the spacesuit helmet with a volunteer stepping down about 18 inches and collapsing - dead with a broken neck; this was repeated multiple times with a different design each time (eight or nine all told). It was nearly impossible with the materials of the day to design a spacesuit which was not literally lethal because of the weight problem of the helmet and the internal pressure of the suit - a different neck seal problem than, say, that of an old fashioned deep sea diver. It cost really big bucks and a lot of lives to develop the Apollo suits. (It also cost a lot of lives - a good friend from high school went into running tests on gas mixtures after the fire, who went nuts from the carnage - to work out the right long term gas mixture they breath. That is another dark saga!)