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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
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html
Is it just me, or does this sound like something out of Sci-Fi? Sleek, skintight, spacesuits? Anyway... Finally! A redesign of the spacesuits. This has been coming for a while, and most people probably should have forseen a new design. What amazes me is how futuristic and sci-fi this sounds... or is it just progress? What ever the case, this is real progress and innovation.
I swear that's Thatcher
And on that note, how is having 300 lbs (or mass-equivalent) less gear going to keep you from hopping off the moon into outerspace forever? Didn't the extra mass come in handy to keep people from flying away?
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
You can exert mechanical pressure but the real air pressure inside the suit is going to be zero. That means water is going to boil off. Presumably they have considered that issue.
One, how are they going to keep the astronaut warm/cool in it
The main advantage of counter-pressure suits would be ditching the gas pressure that makes movement difficult. Additional layers could be added for radiation shielding and temperature/moisture control. As long as the additional layers did not inhibit movement as much as the traditional suit, it would still be a net gain development in the technology.
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
Astronauts run the same risk in today's suits. The difference is with traditional suits, a puncture leads to your blood boiling and a quick asphyxiation from lack of atmosphere. Boy-o.
I'm thinking this has some inherent drawbacks. With gas pressure regulation, the pressure inside the suite is the same regardless of whether you are inside the space capsule (at 16psi ambient pressure) or outside (at zero PSI ambient). It seems to me that if this thing is mechanically applying 16 PSI in vacuum then it must apply 32 PSI when inside the capsule. That's going to raise your blood pressure. Not by enough to be harmful, (after all scuba divers have the same). But more importantly, if you take our helmet off now you suffocate inside the space capusle. You suffocate first because you cannot physcally open your lungs with 32 PSI pressing on them in a 16psi atmosphere. And secondly even if you solved that, then you still have the problem of the 32 psi pressure making it harder to dissolve gas in your blood, so your cells cant get air or release CO2. And finally, if you took your kemet off then you have the extra 16 psi in your bloodstream pushing against the back of your eye-balls.
I wonder how they dealt with that?
One speculation might be that they made the suit not stretchy but just a fixed size that EXACTLY fits you. This way you have no pressure until you expand into the suit which then applies a counter force.
However I cant' see that actually being possible, and having any flexibility. If You expand even slightly your blood pressure will drop. it would have to fit everywhere exactly, down to the gonads. cause you'd get enormous swelling in any place there was no counter-force.
Finally, I can't see how this works around your head. If the suit is not pressurized then how do you maintain 16psi pressure on the face? Sure you could have the person breath through a regulator. But the face itself would not have pressure on it.
Obviously I don't understand how this thing works or can work.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Third Thought: In order to deliver the one-third the pressure exerted by Earth's atmosphere that these suits will need to be custom designed for each individual. Which is fine if you plan on using the suit in a short period of time. Not so great for a mission to mars, where by the time they get there travelers would have lost quite a bit of muscle and body fat. I doubt the suit would still fit properly to provide the necessary (minimum) 30 kPa's.
Astronauts run the same risk in today's suits. The difference is with traditional suits, a puncture leads to your blood boiling and a quick asphyxiation from lack of atmosphere. Boy-o.
Astronauts get into their spacesuits and decompress for quite awhile to a low pressure; about 3 psi if I remember correctly. A complete loss of pressure will not cause any decompression problems at this point. Even without decompression, your blood still would not boil if exposed to a vacuum. Your body maintains enough mechanical pressure to keep the blood at about 1.5 psi. The blood will only boil if you put it into an open container and expose it to vacuum. Of course, the asphyxiation problem remains...
If you do, then, sure, you can optimize the heck to meet your goals, at the expense of everything else. Whopee ding.
But in the real world, astronauts will be happy to trade off style for function. Especially life-saving functions.
These spandex suits may look keen, but you've traded away:
Just a few weeks back there was some anime / subliminal propoganda sponsored by the japanese equivalent of NASA, and they had suits which looked just like that :O
(That series also introduced me to reverse polish calculators, and it's true, I can no longer stand to use a regular calculator; RPN just seems so much more elegant...)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
It's sex appeal.
Remember, we could be sending robots everywhere for the price of this. Science is not what NASA cares about. NASA cares about their budget. Going to Mars sells well. Going to Mars in skin-tight suits sells better.