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NASA's Space-Suit Drama Could Delay Our Trip To the Moon (thedailybeast.com)
Zorro quotes a report from The Daily Beast: After years of planning, NASA is finally launching a new effort to send astronauts back to the moon and then onward to Mars. But one important piece of technology is missing: a new space suit. Fifty-three years after astronaut Ed White stepped outside his Gemini 4 capsule on the first-ever spacewalk for an American, NASA is stuck using decades-old suits that critics say are too old, too bulky, too rigid, and too few in number for America's new era of space exploration.
Astronauts could need as many as three different kinds of space suits for a single mission. NASA has plenty of flight-suit options, but its extravehicular activity or EVA suits are old and dwindling in number. And the agency doesn't have any suits specifically for surface missions. Time is running out to make up the space suit shortfalls. NASA plans to launch Exploration Mission 1, the first test of Orion and its heavy rocket, as early as 2020. The Lunar Gateway station could be ready for use five or six years later. Despite these looming deadlines, NASA "remains years away from having a flight-ready space suit... suitable for use on future exploration missions," the agency's inspector general warned in a 2017 audit.
Astronauts could need as many as three different kinds of space suits for a single mission. NASA has plenty of flight-suit options, but its extravehicular activity or EVA suits are old and dwindling in number. And the agency doesn't have any suits specifically for surface missions. Time is running out to make up the space suit shortfalls. NASA plans to launch Exploration Mission 1, the first test of Orion and its heavy rocket, as early as 2020. The Lunar Gateway station could be ready for use five or six years later. Despite these looming deadlines, NASA "remains years away from having a flight-ready space suit... suitable for use on future exploration missions," the agency's inspector general warned in a 2017 audit.
The article claims that the Russian Orlan EVA suits are similarly outdated to the NASA ones, and that Russian Sokol suits are sometimes used by NASA astronauts. But it makes no mention of European or Chinese suits.
Apparently they do, I well remember a few years ago they did a big media splash about a 'design project' wanting public input, mostly on what colour and fashion style they should be.
Perhaps if they had spent just a little more time designing an actual space suit, and less time on PR/Public Image, then they may have one.
Here we go, 2014 (a random story pre, and the results post)..
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/179157-nasa-shows-off-next-generation-z-2-spacesuits-makes-us-question-its-fashion-sense
https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-s-next-prototype-spacesuit-has-a-brand-new-look-and-it-s-all-thanks-to-you
You're talking about suits that were designed 70 years ago, using technology and materials from 80+ years ago..
That you can't comprehend we've moved beyond that and want to use modern suits is fucking hilarious. You're a total fucking moron.
Spacenutters don't know that they are nuts; they think 1 Gm is the same as 1 Km if you wish hard enough, and that humans are somehow better at sensing with their narrow 600 nm range (300-900 nm) of the electromagnetic spectrum than devices that can actually detect everything from Planck (1.616199(97)×10 meters) and above without technological limit. There is a nearly infinite amount of actual real events on earth alone that people are unable to observe directly but which are critical to its ecosystems and readily observable by satellites. Using those same instruments and even better ones will produce more data, accomplish more for research, and provide more value than space travel with human passengers.