Well Suited for Space
At the bottom of NASA’s 40-foot-deep swimming pool – known as the Neutral Buoyancy Lab – astronauts strap on weights and plastic piping to simulate the backpack that attaches to a spacesuit. Then they
Well Suited for Space
At the bottom of NASA’s 40-foot-deep swimming pool – known as the Neutral Buoyancy Lab – astronauts strap on weights and plastic piping to simulate the backpack that attaches to a spacesuit. Then they walk, hop, run, climb and shovel. And then they rate the difficulty of each task with each particular weight and each backpack design. One is too heavy, another is too light. One backpack is too low, another too high.
It's kind of a space-age Goldilocks story, with the goal, of course, of finding the design that's just right.
It’s been two decades since the spacesuit of the shuttle era was designed – a 300-pound personal spaceship built to work in weightlessness and protect astronauts from the vacuum, searing heat and freezing cold of space. It’s done its job well, but it’s not made for the moon.
For one thing, today’s suit is too heavy for the partial gravity of planetary exploration. It’s built for astronauts who will be working with their hands and floating, not walking, riding, climbing and digging. And since it’s only meant to be worn on spacewalks, astronauts wear other suits for launch and landing. That takes up precious space on a small ship.
In other words, NASA needs a new suit.
So, engineers and scientists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston are designing a spacesuit for the Constellation Program – the program that is building the next human spacecraft for America, a craft that will fly to Earth orbit, to the moon and beyond. Imitating the moon on Earth to find the best design means going to great lengths – suspending astronauts from the ceiling; sending them 40 feet down and 34,000 feet up; traveling to the bottom of the ocean and to the desert of Arizona. And that’s in addition to the work done in conventional laboratories at Johnson and other NASA centers.
“The suit’s made up of a bunch of different components,” said Scott Cupples, the Constellation spacesuit element lead. “It takes a lot of coordination. We’re looking at each little thing and trying to decide how we can do it better.”
Though NASA has only been actively planning to return to the moon since 2004, engineers actually began looking at this problem more than 10 years ago, with the first Desert RATS – or Research and Technology Studies – trip. Since 1997, scientists and engineers from NASA centers across the country have gathered annually in the Arizona desert, in some of the same places Apollo astronauts trained for lunar missions, to simulate the kind of activities astronauts might need to do when exploring the moon or Mars.
"You can sit behind a computer and dream up requirements and corresponding design approaches, but you've got to put them into action to see if they are feasible,” said Joe Kosmo, a senior project engineer who started the