NASA chooses two companies to build spacesuits for its 21st century Moonwalkers

On Wednesday, NASA announced a plan to purchase new and more versatile spacesuits for its astronauts in order to land humans on the Moon.

After more than a decade of work to develop a new spacesuit in-house, NASA said it would instead buy spacesuit services from two private companies.

Each of these companies will be able to use technology NASA has worked on but are responsible for the overall development of the spacesuits used on the International Space Station and activities on the lunar surface. The spacesuits will likely be demonstrated in the form of a spacewalk outside the space station by the year 2025.

The director of NASA's Johnson Space Center said that the previous suit has been the workhorse for 40 years.

NASA will provide a limited amount of guaranteed funding to support spacesuit programs at Axiom and Collins as part of their ongoing embrace of commercial space and goal of becoming one of many spaceflight customers. Between now and 2034, most of the funding will be paid out through task orders. Both companies will be able to bid to provide spacesuit services, including ongoing maintenance, for Artemis missions to the Moon. The contract has a ceiling of $3.5 billion.

NASA will have requirements for the spacesuits, but they won't make the design decisions. The goal of the agency is to give private companies the freedom to innovate and design spacesuits that will fulfill NASA's needs and those of private customers. NASA hopes to move faster and get a better value for taxpayers by leaning into the private sector. A flexible design that will accommodate all sizes of astronauts is a firm requirement. The new suits have to fit a woman at the fifth percentile and a man at the 95th percentile.

The winners

Mike Suffredini, the chief executive of Axiom Space, said Wednesday that the company's customers want to do spacewalks. The spacesuit project will need 300 additional employees to work in the dusty environment on the surface of the moon.

Suffredini said it was great to have a partnership where you could benefit from the years of experience that NASA has.

Collins Aerospace will lead a team that includes ILC and Oceaneering. Collins was the designer of the Apollo spacesuits used during the first Moon landings. Dan Burbank, senior technical fellow for the company, said that Collins does not have a private space station, but that it will offer its suits to other companies.

The companies won the opportunity. When NASA first announced the private spacesuit program, more than 40 firms were listed as interested parties. Sierra Space, Blue Origin, and others were interested in the project.

A long road to new suits

Over the last 14 years, NASA has undertaken several different programs to develop a new generation of spacesuits. NASA spent $420 million on various spacesuit efforts, but they have yielded limited results. NASA used to have a plan to build six suits with contractor and vendor support and then issue a contract to produce additional suits.

The manager of the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston said that it became clear that the space agency should share what it has learned through xEMU with the industry.

She said that they never intended a government to be a production house. When that transition should occur was the question. We decided to give these guys the knowledge we had gained from xEMU so they could kick-start. The sooner we got them on the path to actually delivering flight suits, the more likely we were to make our schedule.

The Artemis III mission will land two astronauts on the Moon in 2025. According to independent reviews of the Artemis program, this date might be more realistic due to the readiness of a lunar lander and spacesuits capable of handling lunar dust.