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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
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
is Margaret Thatcher modelling it?
I'm going to have alot trouble hiding my giant boner as I check out the female astrounaut corps.
Kinda reminds me of the suits from Star Trek TOS - sans the goofy helmet and the nameplate - or of something from Power Rangers...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
They're waiting for you, Gordon. In the Test Chamber.
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.
All these skintight spacesuits on attractive women in science fiction movies are finally reality!
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Masses 300lbs, weighs nothing, but still no friend of mobility.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The next thing they have to make is a chain metal bikini that can give Elven Warrior Maidens the protection from dragon fire they need.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Mmm mmm.... what? Dave Newman? blarghghgh NOOO!
Oh. DavA Newman... whew!
http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/www/people/dnewman/bi o.html
What more could a nerd ask for. I mean really, she designs
space suits.
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.
of somebody wearing spandex and a helmet.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
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.
Welcome to a world where the Fantastic Four get science right. Nooooooooooooo!
One of the interesting space startups at the moment is Orbital Outfitters, a company supplying space suits for the NewSpace community. Go sell them this technology so they can actually test it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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..
n g-Galaxy-Eight/dp/0316771635
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-Colonizi
ìì!
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.
If the suit is skintight, then we should see a lot more of the Female Astronaut Program. All of it!
Of course, this development will open the way for space fashion. Designers will now be able to dress up the outside of astronauts, without it looking like a 1950s monster movie. Superfluous garments that don't constrain us will now be possible, and we'll start competing with them out on the space cameras.
It'll finally look a lot more like the SF movies that have inspired most of us to care about humans in space. Now all we'll need is those neat little hoops at the ends of their arms and legs. And a talking robot.
--
make install -not war
You also make it a lot less vulnerable to life-threatening damage.
Chalk up another one for the old Analog, right along with Giant Meteor Impact.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
they must still use a normal life support system for the head, as you can't wrap anything over the astronauts head. i wonder how this would cope with a rip in the fabric to, you might have your flesh ripped from your bones and out the hole in the suit?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Kudos to the fine folks at MIT, but again, they have done nothing new.
The first human in space was piloting an X-15 while the rocket program was still producing some rather impressive fireworks displays.
I bet the Chinese are happy. Because after all, the US can barely keep its space shuttle flying, while the Chinese are planning a manned moon mission. They need these suits a lot more.
/sarcasm
Yes, call me a troll. After all, US foreign policy has done so much for world peace in the past few years. Those billions were well spent, boys.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
http://img.verycd.com/posts/0702/post-495495-11723 22061.jpg
With a gas-pressurized suit, you put it on at atmospheric pressure and pump it up as you go outside. These squeezy suits are surely going to *hurt* if you wear them in a normal atmospheric pressure environment, and I dont see a way of ramping up the squeeze factor. Oh well, maybe they've got that in there somewhere, I just dont see it.
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.
Traveler from GDW made a big point about space suits being skin tight at higher tech levels, so that users would not be encumbered, just sort of popped in my head when reading the headline.
Same principle was used on Mars in Heinlein's Red Planet.
meh
I thought most of the problems are because the spacesuit needs to insulate against the heat and cold, and protect from radiation?
"Feels like I'm wearing nothing at all... Nothing at all... Nothing at all..."
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Heat especially is actually easier since human skin has built-in evaporative cooling. Can't beat vacuum for insulation. Most of the heating/cooling problems of current suits are self-inflicted by their bulky closed designs.
Radiation? Nothing shorter than UV is going to be stopped by a suit anyway and UV can be blocked by that beautiful silver film.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
won't people see the diaper?
How we know is more important than what we know.
These suits were described in Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
Dr Seuss wrote sci-fi?
Blank until
The pound is a unit of force. It's metric equivalent would be the Newton. The British Engineering unit for mass is called the slug, which is ~14.6kg.
Sig free's the way to be.
One of them is my collection of Astounding/Analog. Another, frankly, is a son who haunts used bookstores and sends me copies I'm missing from my collection.
Now, all I need to do is knock over the University of Arizona's Special Collections library. I spent too many hours there as a student reading every issue that John Campbell edited, clear back to the 30s.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I believe the book was "A Mote in God's Eye", where I first saw this concept explored.
It also seemed to be one of the more hard science fiction books -- for instance, though there was faster-than-light travel between systems, travel within a system was still sublight, and without any sort of artificial gravity or "inertial dampening" -- if you want gravity, you accelerate, and there are couches to let you accelerate faster (3g or so), but when you're not moving, everything's weightless.
(Getting even more offtopic, I wonder if Firefly might've worked just as well without artificial gravity. It'd be difficult to do, though.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Workaround: After following that link, go to the Address Bar and hit enter. Since the referral is now coming from the same URL as the image itself, it'll work this time.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
n/t
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I won't put one of these on without a radiation-proof 'nad shield.
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.
Or is today just redundant day today?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Finally a reason to send Jessica Alba into space...
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.
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:
The suit has to supply enough mechanical pressure to keep it from puffing out in response to the pneumatic pressure inside the suit.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
They're still going to be making next generation space suits out of cloth? The hell with that! Give me the energy skinsuits from Dan Simmon's Hyperion books. While we're at it, I wouldn't mind a pair of Ouster angel wings, a FORCE assault rifle, and Hawking-Drive equipped starship.
This looks a lot like the space activity suit from the sixties. In fact, there's an edit in the wikipedia entry from january 2005 noting that the MIT is doing research that would lead to the suit we are seeing today.
Check the papers at the end of the wikipedia article, too.
GPG 0x1B479C78
great, we're totally going to attract the wrong kind of interstellar crowd when our space-folk start flaunting some camel-toe in these suits.
ôó
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
the astronauts will have to wear the diaper on the outside.
On a microscopic scale skin has no problem being exposed to vacuum for short periods of time (hours). The purpose of the suit is to hold back moderate pressures on a scale of greater than about a millimeter, so that air pressure doesn't explode your chest, so that blood an other body fluids don't boil, and so that blisters don't form from fluids trying to escape the body's fluid-tight skin.
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Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Human skin actually does a very good job of selective permeability; osmotic pressures across it easily exceed an atmosphere. All it really needs is mechanical support to prevent the Mother of All Hickeys.
So, no, it wasn't a joke. Nice that you can't tell which of my posts are serious though. I think. Maybe.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
That was a funny show. The SSA was hilariously incompetent at times.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The suit's pressure takes care of that. Everyone's dick looks the same, a paper thin wrap around your entire torso.
Humping will be easier too, or more, umm, fullfilling. Less grapplifying but more gratifying. And using the vacuu-toilet might be easier, too.
Anyway, I suppose these suits will make it easy to pass each other in tubular corridors during times a newly implemented "readiness condition" could be useful. Imagine the conditions they have now: either the protective gear is worn or not worn. Now, imagine needing to grab only the helmet and a mini bottle of air....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This story was carried in PopSci a few years ago. It looks as though they have made little progress. I imagine they are trying to stir up publicity to get some more funding. P.S. Every 300lb suit you carry to space means 300lbs less cargo/supplies you get to take. At >$10,000 a kilo, cutting a hundred or two pounds is a big deal (especially for numerous suits).
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.
Please allow Jeri Ryan to become an astronaut. She looks good in something skintight.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
On of the early astronauts, in the Gemini program I believe, punctured his glove. There was a metal part in his glove that got lose and poked a hole. He got a hole too; Earth now has little blood drops orbiting it.
He didn't notice until he got inside.
Out back. Take the tp with you.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Niven is also on record saying that it was criticisms from MIT students chanting "The ringworld is unstable" which at least partly inspired him to fix engineering problems in Ringworld in Engineers of Ringworld.
In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. - Ursula Le Guin
I wonder if they can incorporate some sort of radiation shielding into the fabric? If they can, I wonder if it would be adequate to protect humans on long-duration space flights?
nothing at all, nothing at all!, NOTHING AT ALL!
Stupid sexy Flanders!
While this isn't the best scenario, it's not as scary as you would think.
Does it come in velour?
I've got your sig, right here.
So these new suits look something like this?
Are they going to start using high school girls for astronauts too?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Nope, Kim Stanley Robinson. A name that is both effeminate and ultra-manly at the same time. Anyway, Ann would give you an angry glare, while Sax would just tilt his head and consider you unimportant.
I remember reading about this idea a long time ago, perhaps even in Analog magazine. Because the skin is gas tight, all you need is a suit to provide the counter pressure to prevent blowouts. So the idea is finally being tried out.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Can they make this yet?
I want mine now.
sic transit gloria mundi
They say themselves in the article that it is not a space suit, but a pressure suit. There are other considerations, like Alpha radiation or esp Beta.
Getting a wedgie while floating in Space just doesn't seem right.
I wonder how well these new suits would work during a Canadian winter.
Has everyone forgotten the poundal? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundal
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Maybe since they're having so much trouble with the stretchy joints, they could use the properties of carbon nanotubes as mentioned in another slashdot article from today to their advantage.
Toight like a tiger
I don't know exactly what kind of gel do you have in mind, but I thought gelatinous paste or very viscous fluid would tend to leek less than, e.g. water, in case the suit gets damaged. Just in case you had an actual objection on the subject of space hygiene and not just tried to pull a joke which I missed, I propose following method for changing into something more comfortable after getting home from space work:
1. remove suit
2. take a shower to wash off the rest of the filler
3. dry
4. put on space station casual clothes
5. have suit washed (change filler after each use to prevent unwanted microbe farming) and store it away.
I couldn't find Cowboy Bebop screenshots of the episode Bohemian Rhapsody, but this looks just too similar :) Even the helmet with colors and all..
will this happen?
--- Stop the world! I want to get off!
I thought the title said swimsuit. Then I thought "It figures MIT guys would be interested in THAT!"
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Dr. Dava isn't too bad herself. A hot chick who is ALSO an MIT Professor? Nice! Why can't I meet a brilliant gorgeous blonde?
http://www.htcherocentral.com
In the creation of an Iron Man armor.
Can I get the outside airbrushed? If so, I call the Superman spacesuit!
This design is exciting news. It was even more exciting when I read about this sort of design before...in 1968, in one of John W. Campbell's editirials in the science fiction magazine "Analog".
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
If we can form fit it to ourselves, then we can form fit it to animals as well. Imagine training a dog or chimpanzee wearing one of these suits to fetch tools, packages, etc. on the moon or Mars.
Also if it works in space, it will likely provide a major improvement for deep sea diving as well.
Just compare the world's oldest diving suit and a modern lightweight diving suit.
The gel could have some anti-microbial chemicals in it (alcohol?) akin to that hand-sanitizer stuff. Actually, you could probably get away with using just that, seeing as it's pretty viscous already.
Since this stuff is likely to be applied around the 'diaper region' anyway, this might be moving toward a kind of 'liquid diaper' kind of thing - seriously. Like a very tight pair of rubber underwear that is filled with sanitary gel prior to donning a suit (yea I know, gross). It would keep the suit clean, and would also help with that much needed trip to the john after your spacewalk.
I'm glad I'm not testing this stuff.
The classic example of this is that you cannot breath air in through a tube from the surface when on the bottom of a pool.
Yeah, but it's not from a failure to operate your diaphragm; it's from the fact that 14.7 psi of air pressure (from the open end of the tube) is less than the 19 psi pushing in on your lungs. They can't inflate because the air you're breathing in doesn't have enough pressure to inflate them.
Wrong. THere's a 16 pound difference you can't over come with your lungs. See above answer.
And, yet, there's a model, wearing the suit and (presumably, since we're not reading her obituary) breathing completely normally.
People breath all the time with mechanical pressure across their chest, for instance, women who wear bras. You don't have to overcome the 16 psi because it's not pushing on your lungs, it's pushing on your ribcage.
Wrong. basic chemistry at work.
Yeah. Basic chemistry. That's how you dissolve gasses in liquids - by increasing the pressure. That's why divers get the bends; the high-pressure air they're breathing forces nitrogen gas into their body fluids. Because it's under high pressure, there's more gas in their fluids at the bottom of the sea than there would normally be at 1 atm; as they return to the surface and the pressure decreases, the nitrogen begins to come out of solution. As it does it can create dangerous bubbles in the body.
The reason that divers have to return slowly is to give that nitrogen time to escape through the body's regular mechanisms - because the high pressure has super-saturated their blood and fluids with it.
Likewise the energetic cost of transfering gas o2 into the pressurized blood will be higher when the blood is pressurized higher.
Blood oxygenation relies a lot more on osmotic gradient than on bond enthapies. Maybe you're problem is that chemistry is all that you know.
(how do you seal the bubble without crushing your neck, for example.)
A neck seal, like they've used for ages. Again, with a working prototype right there in the article, all you people saying "that's impossible" are wrong from the outset.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
One of the reasons that current space suits need waste storage systems is that the acts of donning or removing the suit takes several hours by itself. If you've got a 3 hour job to do and it takes 3 hours to put the suit on and take it off, that's 9 hours. Most people can go 9 hours without using the bathroom, but it's not likely to be very comfortable by the end. If this suit takes only minutes to put on or remove, you don't need to plan spacewalks as extensively because it's not a major inconvenience to come inside for a few minutes to take a break and in the case of a real emergency, well, suck it up like the rest of us have to do on the ground.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
.... for a remake of Amazon Women on the Moon.
Have gnu, will travel.
please show me an example of a neck seal that can sustain a differential pressure of an atmosphere.
...wha? Are you even reading my posts? I said bond enthalpy didn't have anything to do with it, and it doesn't.
Well, here's one here.
http://www.subtechsystems.ca/genesis.html
You'll notice that it includes a neoprene neck seal. Seriously - it's not that hard. Go down to the drug store and buy a pair of swim goggles - you'll see a seal around the edge that's more than sufficiently effective to hold back a pressure difference of several PSI when held against human skin.
First you claim that higher pressures do affect the solvency of the gas and then you claim they don't matter because of osmotic gradients.
If you pressurize something you affect the solvency.
Yes, abundantly. Specifically, if you increase the pressure of an enclosed container containing both a fluid and a gas, more of the gas dissolves into the fluid.
Simple chemistry. "Covalent bonds of CO", whatever you thought you meant by that, has nothing to do with it - the reactions occur spontaneously according to osmotic gradient.
And the question was, how does it work when there's these fundamental issues that are hard to see how it overcomes?
If you'd start by correcting your incredible misunderstandings of science, physics, and human physiology, you might understand how. It's not hard to maintain a seal against the human body - the gasket around a $2 pair of swim goggles does just that - and it's not hard to understand how increased gas pressure means more gas dissolved in solvent. It's why deep sea divers worry about the bends.
The parent's whole misconception was that a higher pressure in your lungs meant a decreased amount of oxygen entering your blood, but that's not true at all - an increased pressure of oxygen means more oxygen in your lungs - think back to the idea gas law - and because lung gas exchange is based on osmotic gradients, an increased amount of oxygen means your blood oxygenates even more thoroughly.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!