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New NASA Spacesuit Looks Like Buzz Lightyear's
SternisheFan sends this excerpt from Space.com:
It might make the astronaut wearing it look like a real-life Buzz Lightyear, but a new prototype spacesuit that NASA just finished testing represents the first major overhaul in spacesuit technology since 1998. Flexible, white, and lime green accented, the suit — known as the Z-1 — is designed not only to help astronauts comfortably maneuver during spacewalks in microgravity, but also to deftly move about when walking on the surface of a planet or other smaller heavenly body, like an asteroid. [Engineer Amy Ross] said, 'the shuttle EMU splits at the waist and you put pants on and you put the top on separately and they connect in the middle. Whereas with this suit, the subject crawls in through the back, and then we just shut the door.' Creating a back-entry suit solves a few of the problems spacewalkers often face during trips to the International Space Station. Using airlocks to depressurize is a time consuming, exhausting process. By using a back-entry design, the astronauts won't need to go through an airlock at all. The suit hooks up to the outside of the spacecraft using the "space port" opening, and the spacewalker simply climbs in and detaches."
Not new news anyway. This is like 6 months old.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
From July: http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/07/26/2258227/
If the suits are hooked up to the spacecraft as specified, it would be rather easy to test the integrity of the suits by inflating them to a specific pressure and waiting to see if the pressure drops. In fact, one could leave them inflated and if the pressure drops the access door won't open.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Dragon, it has not yet received NASA blessing for manned flight but that's mostly checkboxes. In fact due to the nature of the Falcon 9's Merlin engine it's probably safer than anything NASA has previously man rated. Remember that the Shuttle with a 1% mission failure profile was man rated.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yeah, but a mud room means less patching of holes in the suits, while still being able to do pressure tests.