This Is What the Next Space Suit Will Look Like
For the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, you’ve no doubt seen plenty of photos of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins in their classic space suits, circa 1969. But what will space suits look like when we make it back to the Moon, or to our next great frontier, Mars?
First off, let’s get the lingo right: They’re Extravehicular Mobility Units, EMUs for short. And they’ll be waiting for you to slip into on the Moon’s surface when you arrive.
“Unlike Apollo, where we stayed for a maximum three days, we’re going to need suits that are very robust,” says Shane Jacobs, Ph.D., lead spacesuit designer for the David Clark Company. “[They] will have to be very reliable, and have to be serviced, maintained, and used for many, many, many extravehicular activities, for hours at a time.” Here’s a look at the next EMU.
Helmet
New helmets are elongated, narrower through the shoulders and longer front to back. This gives wearers a broader field of view, especially of the ground, and makes room for mounted communications devices.
Plus, no more “Snoopy cap” worn on the head inside the helmet. Two inverted cones built into the shield plug the nose so wearers can blow hard to equalize ear pressure.
Side benefit: it can satisfy an itch. “So whenever anybody says you can’t scratch your nose in space,” says Jacobs, “well, actually you can.”
Gloves
They must be nimble. “If a human can’t get in there and do those fine, dexterous tasks, then that eliminates one of the main reasons that we’re putting the human at the work site,” says Jacobs. But they also must be durable to protect against sharp regolith or temperature extremes, and showers of micrometeoroids. Some internal parts could be custom-fit to an astronaut’s hands right on the moon using a 3D printer.
Life Support Backpack
Contains compressed oxygen and a pump to circulate liquid through the suit’s cooling system. The pack is low-slung, providing a lower center of gravity than in the Apollo packs, which caused astronauts to fall, says Pablo de León, Ph.D., director of the Human Spaceflight Laboratory at University of North Dakota.
Joints
Apollo suits used cables and pulleys to help astronauts lift their limbs. Prototype suits feature a 3-bearing shoulder, dual-axis waist, hip swivel, and break line at the back of the knee to provide much greater range of motion than the Apollo suits had.
Environmental Protection Garment
Each speck of lunar dust and rock is sharp and abrasive because there’s no water erosion to buff the edges. So, for the suit’s outer layers, robust fabrics will be infused with tough coatings to protect the inner mobility garment. Researchers are also devising ways to deal with the vast temperature swings on the moon’s surface—from a high of 260°F in sunlight to a low of minus 280°F. A likely solution: layers of aluminized Mylar and aerogels to reduce thermal transfer on the fabric.
🚀 PLUS: How to Get Into a Moon Suit
You’ll step into it, slipping into the legs and torso of the EMU from behind. That’s fairly easy to do. Getting out is another story: While attempting to wriggle their bodies out of the lower portion during tests, astronauts found that the suit’s knee and ankle joints “acted as a Chinese finger trap, trapping them.” Solution: Engineers designed a “boot jack,” similar to the kind that helps you take off cowboy boots, to restrain the heels and keep the suit in a straight-legged position, widening the path for legs and feet.
This article appeared in the July/August 2019 issue of Popular Mechanics. You can subscribe here.
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