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NASA Testing Lighter Space Suits For Asteroid Work
Zothecula writes "Sometimes you have to take a step back to take a step forward. NASA is carrying out initial tests on a new, lighter spacesuit for use by the crew of the Orion spacecraft that is currently under development. The tests are being carried out in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas on a modified version of the pumpkin orange suit normally worn by Space Shuttle crews during liftoff and re-entry and is a return to a space suit design of the 1960s."
The problem is the money wasted every time they move the goalposts to "save money." This happens constantly at NASA. I wonder how much cheaper it would be to actually finish some projects as planed, instead of redesigning to cut costs halfway through each time?
Nah think bigger picture. NASA needs to start filming and selling zero-g porn. They'll have a virtual monopoly on the stuff and the adult industry is worth $10+ billion a year. That's twice what NASA spent on space operations in 2011.
And in case you think it's a joke, and not a commentary on how sad it is people would rather invest in seeing money shots than real science, I haz links :
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/659660main_NASA_FY13_Budget_Estimates-508-rev.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html
(although it is cheering to know that the entire NASA budget is bigger than the porn industry, although I must admit I was a little surprised by the 3 billion spent on "cross agency support" -- what's that about?)
The problem is the projects take far longer than politicians are in power for - you're looking at easily a decade from conception, design, test and launch. The Mars rovers are an anomaly as they're generally done "on the cheap" just to see what was possible, but it still took a long time to actually plan out and do it all.
And with NASA's budget and goals being at the whim and fart of politicians, well, it can't be helped.
If you ever wonder why NASA spends so much on public relations, that's probably the only thing keeping base funding alive - just having public awareness they exist and that space is interesting means they get some funding.
First zero g porn was shot on a private vomit comet. Don't recall the name.
It had to suck, being made up of 22 second zero g shots edited together.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
NASA might have been expensive, but they pioneered a lot of things that are used every day, and not just Tang.
One can list hundreds of things that have come from NASA's moon launches and are used in common products these days. LEDs, airplane de-icing systems, fire-resistant materials, and non-destructive stress testing are just starters.
Of course, NASA has become the political whipping boy because it doesn't have immediate ROI. No, sending a robot to Mars might not have dollars rolling in, but the technological hurdles overcome to do the missions are things learned and can be used in the private sector.
"They never learned to build infrastructure. They never wanted to launch a mission that had any risk." It's hard to tell what NASA you are talking about here, NASA in the '60s or NASA in the 2000's? If it was NASA in the 60's then you are wrong. NASA in the 60's was all about risky missions. I personally heard Frank Borman at a conference a few years ago state that when he launched on Apollo 8 he figured that he had a 50% chance of coming back. For lasting infrastructure, the Vehicle Assembly Building and the crawler-transporter at Kennedy were built for the first Saturn V then used through the Space Shuttle program with plans for use by SLS. Same for the engine test stands at Stennis in Mississippi. On the pert charts -- one of the acknowledged major accomplishments of the Apollo Program was the development of a management process to successfully pull off such a gigantic and fast moving program.
For short space-walks (under 8 hours), why does the skin need air? Have a suit that's skin-tight (and air tight). It'd keep the pressure without having the bulk and weight of a large air-tight suit. Have cooling/heating lines run in the surface of the skin, like Tron. Then, all you'd need is a helmet attached to the skinsuit.
There has been a fair amount of research on skin suits. One of the downsides is that they have to be individually fitted to each astronaut, but they'd probably be light enough that you could carry six suits for the same mass as one existing suit.
I suspect the big downside is that they've never been tested in space, whereas NASA know their existing suits work.
Would the be a problem with breathing? I mean, literally expanding your chest to inhale if the suit was tight enough to prevent decompression?
Your lungs are designed to work against 15psi. The hard part is preventing them from expanding too much when full of air while your body is in a vacuum, not allowing them to expand at all.
There's a much lighter, working space suit design that's been available for years, and has been repeatedly redesigned. It's called a "skin suit". Essentially a wetsuit with a helmet, the suit relies on the astronaut's own skin as part of its structure holding in the astronaut's body fluids. Air, or oxygen, released into the helmet passes down the suits structure and through the astronaut, themselves, and slowly leaks out the slightly porous material. This avoids the mechanical pressurizaiton problems of providing air at enough pressure to breathe, but dealing with the pressure throughout the enite surace of the suit. It also providing critical cooling for most space suit use. It does consume air or oxygen in use, but the mass lost in days of use is quite modest compared to the mass, difficulty of use, complexity, and mechanical fragility of the heavy and overbuilt modern space suits.
An example can be seen at http://spaceindustrynews.com/mits-next-mars-space-suit/, The technology has worked since the 1960's, when Paul Webb originally designed it.