It hasn’t been good to be walking around in a space suit for a while now. Indeed, the essential clothing for carrying out trips outside the ISS is starting to get old, and trips have been canceled since June 2024 due to a very worrying problem with the spacesuit. A situation quickly corrected by NASA, but which shows the more than pressing need to renew the suits in the months to come.
The incident that calls NASA suits into question
On June 24, 2024, astronaut Tracy Dyson was treated to a very unpleasant surprise during her extravehicular exit from the ISS. Sure enough, his space suit malfunctioned, causing water to gush out and covering the suit’s visor with ice.
The situation forced NASA to shut down the mission, and a second one afterward. Shortly after, the American space agency has indeed canceled another outing because of a discomfort problem linked to astronaut Matthew Dominick’s suit.
Since then, no excursions outside the international space station have taken place. Now, the return to space is planned for 2025, and with new combinations.
Suits way too old
It must be said that we are facing a NASA outfit, aka the extravehicular mobility unit (EMU), which is starting to date. The latter actually dates back to 1998, and it was basically intended to be used for 15 years. A long lifespan which has since been largely exceeded.
“None of our spacesuits are new, as they say, so we expect to see some hardware issues with repeated use,” Matthew Dominick told reporters last week, after returning to Earth in October.
He also recalled that the stakes are incredibly high during spacewalks, which requires reacting quickly to any situation.
“It is one of the things for which we are always, at any second – or at any point in a process – ready to stop, take another direction or implement an emergency procedure […] And that’s exactly what we did,” he stressed.
The requirement to change suits for NASA
Faced with this situation, NASA must update its suits. It has also hired two companies to develop a new batch in 2022, which should allow astronauts not only to carry out spacewalks outside the ISS, but also to walk on the Moon.
While Collins Aerospace left the project, Axiom Space is progressing well on the project, and even showed off its incredible partnership with Prada for the Artemis 3 mission suit planned for 2026.
“But even Axiom Space faces serious financial problems. As Forbes reported in September, the startup struggled to pay the bills and laid off at least a hundred employees,” reports Futurism.
We therefore hope that everything will move forward for the best for the good of the astronauts and future missions in space!
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