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Boeing Unveils New NASA Spacesuits For Starliner Austronaut Taxi (space.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: The NASA astronauts who fly aboard Boeing's new spaceship will wear sleek, blue suits that are lighter, simpler and more comfortable than the bulky orange gear of the space shuttle era, company representatives said. Unveiled today (Jan. 25), the new "Boeing Blue" spacesuits for the Starliner capsule weigh about 20 lbs. (9 kilograms) each with all of their accessories, compared to 30 lbs. (13.6 kg) for the old space shuttle suits, NASA officials said. Other advances include touch-screen-sensitive gloves, more-flexible material and soft helmets that are incorporated into the suit (rather than the hard, detachable helmets of the shuttle era). The Boeing Blue suit, and the one that SpaceX develops, will help keep astronauts safe in the event of an emergency during trips to and from orbit. The suits are not designed for spacewalks; the large, bulky "extravehicular mobility units" that astronauts use for this latter purpose are already aboard the ISS. "The spacesuit acts as the emergency backup to the spacecraft's redundant life-support systems," Richard Watson, subsystem manager for spacesuits in NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said in the same statement. "If everything goes perfectly on a mission, then you don't need a spacesuit. It's like having a fire extinguisher close by in the cockpit. You need it to be effective if it is needed." You can view pictures of the spacesuits here.
I think it's a bit excessive to build a whole starliner for one single guy who'll probably never go into space again anyway.
Or maybe they're talking about this space taxi? Or the song that goes with it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From documentaries I've seen, it seems that retaining flexibility at the joints when pressurized is one of the trickier challenges. Based on the images, it's hard to determine how they address this, but there's probably more going on than shows beneath the outer layers.
Also, I'm pretty sure the orange color was a safety feature of previous suits, not a fashion statement. "Boeing Blue?" Marketing is a hell of a reason to pick a suit color.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.