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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
You've seen too many bad movies. A hole would result in some localized swelling of the exposed tissue. I'd be more concerned about severe sunburn, which can happen quickly in space.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"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,
RTFA. That's exactly the picture *in* TFA!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
won't people see the diaper?
How we know is more important than what we know.
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."
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:
Not to be a Star Trek geek (or too far off-topic), but weren't the Eugenics Wars actually *against* people who were engineered like that? If the last time they tried it, it almost meant the end of civilization as genetically-engineered warlords took over nations, I don't think 200 years would be long enough to take a risk trying it again.
I mean, haven't you seen Wrath of Khan? That guy was bad-ass.
Comment of the year
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
In another book (I think it's N-Space), Niven goes through the Mote universe's physics and describes how the laws of physics would have to change to make that world's tech work. Pretty awesome.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
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!