MIT Team Designs a New, Sleek, Skintight Spacesuit

iamdrscience writes "MIT aeronautics professor Dava Newman has designed a new spacesuit along with her colleague, Jeff Hoffman and a group of students. This is far sleeker and lighter weight than the suits used by astronauts today, promising greater mobility than the traditional bulky suits of today which can weigh 300lbs or more. Instead of gas pressurization, the new prototype BioSuit employs "mechanical counter-pressure" in the form of skin-tight layers wrapped around the body."
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html

Comments

Neat...

[RobertM1968]

Kinda reminds me of the suits from Star Trek TOS - sans the goofy helmet and the nameplate - or of something from Power Rangers...

Re:Neat...

[rben]

Um... StarTrek isn't real. It's a shock, I know, but true. :)

Humanity has, effectively, radically altered it's evolution. We are no longer selecting for the fittest in quite the same way as was done while we were evolving. Now it's more like survival of the richest and most prolific. It's hard to say what effect that will have over the long haul. Back in the first part of the last century, this was a huge worry that gave rise to the ideas that lead to Hitler's genocidal campaigns. Most people don't realize that many, if not most, of the great thinkers of that time were all for coming up with some way to insure that the "lesser" races wouldn't "out breed" their "betters." In the U.S., this lead to a widespread effort to sterilize anyone with a sub-standard I.Q., regardless of the cause of the problem.

We're not far from a time when people who are rich enough will be able to pick and choose traits that they want their children to have. The world of GATTACA might not be so far off. This kind of genetic tailoring makes the most sense when you talk about moving off planet.

People aren't designed to live in space. We have all sorts of problems from space sickness to muscles deterioration. People who spend a long time in space come back to Earth and need months to regain their full strength and health. I suspect we'll see similar problems on the Moon and Mars, where the lower gravity will have as yet unknown medical effects. At the very least, it will probably cause a loss of calcium in the bones, making it difficult for someone who spends a long time on the Moon or Mars to return to Earth.

If we really want to move off the planet, we'll wind up making changes to our bodies and genetic make up in order to better adapt ourselves to the new environment. Think about it, if we can design a human that can live in zero gravity without ill effects, the cost of building space habitats drops by orders of magnitude. Ultimately, if we survive the consequences of our stupidity, I suspect Humanity will split into a bunch of different genetically engineered species that are adapted for different environments, both in space and here on Earth. I can see people going back to the oceans. Perhaps they'll have gills and modified arms and legs. People who live full-time in zero gravity might adopt a more spherical body that is pushed along by much less robust arms and legs. Astronauts might be designed to withstand high gravity acceleration. Ultimately, all these things may become possible.

If we survive long enough, I think it's inevitable.

300 lbs

[iluvcapra]

...can weigh 300lbs or more...

Masses 300lbs, weighs nothing, but still no friend of mobility.

Re:300 lbs

[BigMike1020]

...Masses 300lbs...

Masses 136kg, weighs nothing. Pound is a unit of force, not mass.

Two thoughts...

[tgd]

One, how are they going to keep the astronaut warm/cool in it.

Two, they talk about how its safer if it gets punctured because the hole can just be patched without affecting the rest of the suit. How are you going to puncture it in a way that doesn't puncture, you know... you? Even if the suit doesn't depressurize, it can't be good for your cardiovascular system to have a gaping wound exposed to vacuum or micropressures.

The Millennial Project

[White Shade]

A book called The Millennial project was released several years ago that describes skin-tight space suits in very clear and specific terms, dicussing how a tight material is sufficient to handle the pressure, and how just a chest plate might be useful to provide radiation protection and protection from micrometeors and the like. I believe it described the use of tungsten..

It's a really interesting book, talks about a lot of other technology, and seems pretty darn reasonable about most of it too.

http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizin g-Galaxy-Eight/dp/0316771635

Old idea, new implementation

[tpr]

The idea of using mechanical pressure instead of air pressure is not new; quite aside from the fantasies of SF writers through the years there have been serious attempts to make 'spandex spacesuits' before.

Major problems I've heard of include joint mobility (imagine a tight spandex sleeve - now imagine flexing your arm at the elbow against the resistance of the material) and the sheer unbelievability of the idea for most people. Of course, most of us would look like crap in a tight spandex bodystocking anyway.

Thermal and radiation protection could be handled much as they are now except that it wouldn't be tied to the pressure vessel aspects of the suit. Imagine rather chunky overalls, for example. I suppose the good news is that the outer parts would then be much more universal, making them easier to manufacture and maintain. You could even store them outside the rather cramped airlock and put them on outside in, say, the shuttle bay.

No it does NOT.

[DrYak]

Particularly since coagulation requires the presence of air in order to occur. Your wound wouldn't clot.

No, it does NOT.
If it was the case, you would die from internal bleeding at the slightest shock that would burst the smallest blood vessel.

Contact to air is only 1 of the huge amount of conditions that can trigger cloting.
Pretty much anything that isn't healthy un-wounded endothelium (the thing that covers the walls inside of blood vessels) can trigger clotting (thus the problems that can be encountered with prosthetic cardiac valves, or people who have damaged blood vessel walls because of way too much high cholesterol, or additive that are put inside glass container for blood sample handling).
Bleeding in water is the only case where you don't clot easily. Not because water has some magical properties that prevents clotting, but just because the coagulation factors that are needed for clotting get diluted in the water.

Back to the case, TFA mentions that bandage should be applied over the suit breach. Some pro-coagulant substance coating the middle of the bandage, where it goes over the hole, should help make sure the wound clots well.

Re:No it does NOT.

[complete loony]

It's not going to be fun removing the suit afterwards though.

Jumping with less mass

[AlpineR]

You can jump to a possibly more dangerous height without the extra mass/weight, but you'll quickly learn not to.

Can you? Wouldn't you just land with whatever force you applied at the beginning of the jump? On Earth, I can jump a certain height unloaded and a lesser height while carrying a backpack full of rocks. I'll have farther to fall from the higher jump, but I'll have more mass getting attracted by gravity on the shorter jump. I think they would cancel each other out.

Or, actually, there might be less force during the unloaded jump. When loaded I will achieve a lower velocity than when unloaded. Therefore I will have more time to push against the ground and put more energy into my jump.

Re:Jumping with less mass

[fractoid]

But the point is that you will land with exactly the same force as you would on Earth. The reason that jumping in low gravity is more dangerous isn't intrinsically the height you travel to - it's the fact that you have a much longer fall time and so any slight rotational velocity will affect your orientation that much more. Imagine jumping on Earth, and at the apex of your jump magically being flipped upside down so you land on your head. It wouldn't be pretty.

Re:PHYSICS: Why skin tight may be a bad idea

[goombah99]

I can't say I'm an expert sure but it seems to me it's not symmetrical. Water, i.e. you, is not compressible, but the dissolved gasses and air spaces which are equilibrated to 16 PSi can expand. (when you go from 1->2atm->1 in scuba, the dissolved gasses are still mostly equilibrated to 16psi if it's quick, but you have to decomress if you wait long enough at 2atm. )

Even if you survived the air space expansion, You'd basically have the Bends in few minutes from the dissolved gas release I believe. In addition to the painful pressure they cause, expanded gasses can also do fun stuff like kill nerves.

Re:RTFA

[goodmanj]

Ahem. Vacuum is a wonderful insulator. Your sunward side gets only a little more sun than it does at the beach, and that's assuming you don't have a (nonpressurized) reflective layer to minimize radiative transfer. The opposite side doesn't radiate that much more than it does on a clear night, same comment about screening. No. On a clear night, your body is radiating infrared energy with an effective temperature of 310 Kelvin, and the ground beneath you and the air above you is radiating infrared energy right back with an effective temperature of 250-300 K. In interplanetary space, the void around you radiates infrared energy back at you with an effective temperature near absolute zero K. (closer to 3k, but who's counting.) And the emitted energy goes like the fourth power of the temperature: this is a huge, huge difference. But it's easy to solve this the same way our current spacesuits solve it: several layers of reflective mylar film with vacuum between them, which reduce outgoing infrared to a manageable level.

Air? We don't need no steenking air! Has it occurred to you that several light-years of vacuum is about as good as it gets in terms of removing bodily outgassing? I'd say the problem is more likely the other way around: losing too *much* water vapor. Vacuum has a humidity of zero; even worse, air provides a diffusive boundary layer which tends to trap water near the surface of the skin: the air molecules get in the way of the water molecules trying to escape. For skin within a porous fabric suit exposed to vacuum, evaporation is going to be far worse than the worst desert conditions imaginable on Earth.

OK, you say, I'll just make sure to bring along some moisturizing lotion. There's another problem. A space suit of this type is basically a bottle of fixed volume. Suppose I take a 100-liter bottle and fill it with 95 liters of water plus a ziploc baggie containing 5 liters of air -- the 5 liters of air represents the astronaut's lung volume. Now, it's quite common for a hard-working person to lose a liter of water an hour through perspiration and respiration. Say we double that for the reasons given above. After an hour of hard work, the 100-liter bottle representing our space suit now holds 93 liters of water, and so must hold 7 liters of air. Uh-oh! our baggie can't hold that much air, and ruptures.

I'm overstating the case a little bit, but the point remains that in a constant-volume suit like this, with no air space, any change in body volume, via perspiration, drinking, urination or defacation, comes at the expense of lung volume. If you don't keep things perfectly balanced, you don't get to breathe. On the longer term, if the astronaut goes off his diet and gains say 5 pounds of fat, that's 2-3 fewer liters of lung volume, and again, the astronaut can't breathe. They always said those twinkies would kill ya...