Two U.S. companies have been selected by NASA to build spacesuits.
The suits will be used for spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as for the first crewed missions to Mars.
The contracts were announced by NASA on Wednesday, June 1. The awards are the latest in a growing list of collaborations between NASA and private companies as the agency looks increasingly to the commercial sector to support its space program.
The director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston said that NASA and its partners will develop advanced, reliable spacesuits that allow humans to explore the cosmos.
The Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) contracts that both Collins and Axiom were selected for have a combined potential value of $3.5 billion, and each partner has invested a significant amount of its own money in the projects.
The first tasks to provide a broad range of capabilities for NASA's spacewalking needs outside the ISS in low-Earth orbit and for the highly anticipated Artemis III mission that will endeavor to put the first woman and first person of color on the moon are all part of the contracts that run until
The agency said in a post on its website that NASA experts defined the technical and safety standards by which the spacesuits will be built, and the chosen companies agreed to meet these key agency requirements.
It is clear that the moon suits will need to be more robust and mobile than the ones currently used by astronauts for spacewalks because of the harsh lunar conditions.
Michael Suffredini, the CEO of Axiom, said his team was very pleased that NASA appreciated the value that the company provided across a range of human spaceflight activities.
The spacesuit used by astronauts for the moon landings five decades ago as well as for today's spacewalks outside the International Space Station was designed by ILC Dover.
After hearing about the contract, Dan Burbank, senior technical fellow at Collins, said that astronauts returning to the moon and venturing beyond need a spacesuit that's as modern as their new missions.
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