The Artemis moon program and future International Space Station missions will be made by two companies.
The teams led by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace received access to a contract worth up to a total of $3.5 billion to supply spacesuits for future NASA missions through 2034, agency officials announced today.
The private outfits that send cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station don't have guaranteed orders yet. The Collins-ILC Dover team has decades of experience supplying spacesuits to NASA.
NASA officials said at a press conference today that they will have opportunities to compete for task orders in the future, including a demonstration mission outside the International Space Station and the first Artemis moon landing.
As spacesuit development proceeds within the companies, NASA will be certifying alongside to make sure that they are ready for our astronauts, according to the director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
There are pictures of the evolution of the spacesuit.
The two companies said the work is in line with their plans to contribute spacesuits for customers beyond NASA.
Michael Suffredini, a former senior NASA official who is now president and CEO of Axiom Space, told reporters today that they have a number of customers that would like to do a spacewalk.
The core of a new, independent space station is to be installed by the year 2024 by Axiom Space. One private crewed mission to the International Space Station was run by the company, and there are more in the works.
The spacesuit designs are still at an early stage, although the companies emphasized that their units will be modular, as lightweight and flexible as possible, and will integrate feedback from astronauts and the flight community in assessing the best path forward for completion.
Dan Burbank, a senior technical fellow at Collins Aerospace and a retired NASA astronaut, told reporters today that a spacesuit shouldn't feel like a spaceship.
Burbank spent seven hours on a spacewalk during the space shuttle mission in September of 2006
He said that they want to be able to create an environment that gives the crew member the most mobility.
NASA officials said that the next generation of spacesuits will have a more flexible fit for a wider variety of body types, addressing a criticism of the spacesuits that agency astronauts use at the moment. NASA has conducted just one all-woman spacewalk so far this year, due to the difficulty of changing out the right-sized spacesuit parts.
The agency has two generations of EMUs that have been produced since 1983 to serve space shuttle and ISS missions. The EMU versions were produced by a team.
The water leak in the spacesuit in March that is still being investigated has made it difficult for astronauts to use EMUs on the space station for routine spacewalks. It will take time to determine the cause of the incident, which is the most severe incident of its type since a resolved leaking issue in 2013).
NASA has been working on its own sets of spacesuits for about 15 years. The latest designed to support the Artemis program was called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit.
According to reports from the past, NASA's current drive to procure spacesuits from industry rather than make them in house is designed to save on cost and complexity.
The agency wanted to bring on commercial partners to develop, build and maintain spacesuit technology for spacewalks, which are also called extravehicular activities.
The September 2021 Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services contract solicitation led to the announcement today. All competitors were required to spend money of their own in developing their spacesuit systems.
Both companies that were selected said that their systems are at a fairly advanced state of development already, and that they will continue to borrow information from the bank of information concerning xEMU.
The Apollo missions developed a few types of moonsuit that were used on the lunar surface in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are only a few spacesuits that have ever been used on another world.
NASA said the requirements for the new spacesuits should not be too different from those of the old ones, aside from pressure and the need to walk.
The designs were not discussed during the press conference. Burbank suggested that the spacesuit could be swapped out for a lower torso. The designs of both teams will be refined in the coming years to make sure they meet NASA's needs.
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