SpaceNews.com: NASA selects Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace for spacesuit contracts
NASA awarded contracts to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to provide spacesuits for International Space Station spacewalks and Artemis moonwalks, although neither the agency nor the winning companies offered many technical or financial details.
NASA announced June 1 it selected the two companies for Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contracts to support the development of new spacesuits as well as purchasing spacesuit services. The companies will own the suits they develop and will effectively rent them to NASA for space station and Artemis missions, while also being able to offer the suits to other customers.
The goal, NASA officials said at a briefing about the awards, is to have lunar spacesuits ready for the Artemis 3 lunar landing mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than 2025. NASA will also conduct an "orderly transition" from existing, decades-old suits on the ISS to the new suits around the same time.
[....] the companies provided few technical details about their suit designs, and NASA did not even have illustrations of the winning designs to show, electing instead to release an illustration of two moonwalking astronauts wearing suits not necessarily associated with either company.
[....] The total value of the xEVAS contracts is $3.5 billion through 2034, a figure that assumes all task orders are exercised. NASA officials at the briefing declined to break out that total between the two companies [...]
[....] NASA said in the statement that each company "has invested a significant amount of its own money" into development, but did not disclose those amounts. [...]
[....] Both companies said they expected to have spacesuits ready for testing on the ISS and for the Artemis 3 mission by the mid-2020s, but another company [SpaceX] plans to test its own spacesuit in orbit before then.
Without a bulky constrictive space suit, space is breathtaking!
See also:
Elon Musk Offers for SpaceX to Make NASA Spacesuits, after Watchdog Says Program to Cost Billion
Current Spacesuits Won't Cut It on the Moon. So NASA Made New Ones
NASA's Next Moonsuit is Going to be Damned Impressive
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NASA's Next Moonsuit Is Going to Be Damned Impressive:
"The xEMU [Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit] has been designed from the very beginning to be safer and have fewer catastrophic failure modes than any of its predecessors," Chris Hansen, the EVA Office manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, explained in an email. (EVA stands for extravehicular activity, which is NASA-speak for anything done outside of a vehicle, whether that's in Earth's orbit or on the surface of another planet.)
Space is a dangerous place at the best of times, but the Moon presents some added challenges.
"Going outside of low-Earth orbit and to the surface of the Moon, the suits will be subjected to higher radiation levels and temperature extremes than our current [ISS] suit," said Hansen. "The new suits have more complex avionics [electronics] than the Apollo suits, so we have to be very careful to select parts that are radiation hardened and designed to operate in that environment."
[...] Hansen said he's particularly excited about two new technologies in the xEMU that have never been incorporated into a suit design before.
"One is our new cooling system called the SWME—we pronounce it 'swimmy'—which is the Spacesuit Water Membrane Evaporator," he said. "The SWME uses water evaporation to cool the suits and their astronauts, rather than the process of sublimating ice, which is used by all previous suit designs. This system is much more robust than current sublimators used on the EMU."
The second new piece of technology is called "Rapid Amine," or RCA, which is a new type of carbon dioxide scrubber.
Current spacesuits won't cut it on the moon. So NASA made new ones.:
A spacesuit is more like a miniature spacecraft you wear around your body than an item of clothing. It's pressurized, it's decked out with life support systems, and it's likely to look pretty cool. But should the suit fail, you're toast.
No one has ever died because of a faulty spacesuit, but that doesn't mean current models are perfect. Whether it's for launch into space or reentry back to Earth, or for an extravehicular activity (EVA, colloquially known as a spacewalk), astronauts have never been completely satisfied with the gear they are forced to put on for missions.
[...] The most interesting work, however, has to do with NASA's next-generation spacesuit for astronauts going to the moon—the eXploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU. It is ostensibly the successor to the spacesuits worn by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and other Apollo astronauts when they set foot on the lunar surface half a century ago.... The goal behind Artemis is to have people living and working on the moon. New spacesuits will be critical to ensuring that the experience is safe and comfortable.
"We are so excited about putting people back on the moon," says Richard Rhodes, a spacesuit engineer at NASA who's working on the xEMU. "Our main goal is that the crew doesn't even think about us. They put the suit on, and they do their work—the science, the exploration—and do not even think twice about how mobile they are or how effectively they can work. That's a tall order, but we're trying to get as close to that as possible. We want to be invisible."
The article cites the xEMU as having such things as better mobility (especially for walking), protection from dust, better headset audio, and improved gloves relative to older spacesuit designs.
Elon Musk offers for SpaceX to make NASA spacesuits, after watchdog says program to cost $1 billion:
NASA has spent over $420 million on spacesuit development since 2007 but, even with another $625 million in spending planned, the Inspector General report found that the spacesuits for the agency's lunar missions will "not be ready for flight until April 2025 at the earliest."
Elon Musk offered SpaceX's services to help NASA make its next-generation spacesuits, after a watchdog report on Tuesday said the agency's current program is behind schedule and will cost over $1 billion.
"SpaceX could do it if need be," Musk wrote in a tweet.
[...] Musk's proposal came in response to a report by NASA's Inspector General – which is the investigative office which audits the agency for fraud and mismanagement – on the work being done to develop a new line of Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMU), which are informally called spacesuits.
Astronauts on board the International Space Station use spacesuits "designed 45 years ago for the Space Shuttle" program, the report noted. IG also highlighted that those spacesuits have been "refurbished and partially redesigned" over the past decades to continue working.
[...] The spacesuits have a multitude of different components, which the Inspector General noted are supplied by 27 different companies. That's a point Musk also highlighted, saying in a tweet that it "seems like too many cooks in the kitchen."
See also: Elon Musk offers to make moon spacesuits as report calls out NASA lunar delays
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @02:08AM (1 child)
So up to $3.5B over 12 years and you don't even get to keep the suits? Then they get to rent them out to others and you have to rent them again afterwards? I hope they at least clean them after they come back. Probably have to pay a late fee if you don't get it back by midnight. Who the hell wrote these contract requirements? Like those car leases where you have to pay 25 cents a mile after you hit your limit. I'd like to know how the "significant amount" compares to $3.5B.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @05:58AM
It's based on the Commercial Resupply Services [wikipedia.org] program, so the companies should be paying about half, but the bid details are under NDA so unless there is a lawsuit like happened with the moon lander [wikipedia.org] we'll probably never know. On the up side these are fixed fee milestone contracts, so if Axiom and Collins want to be paid they have to deliver.
As for why they're doing it this way, it's a desperation move. NASA needs two* types of spacesuit and a moon suit and their traditional suppliers have been stuck in development hell since 2009 [spacenews.com] with little** to show for it. NASA finally admitted that there was no possibility of it being ready in time, so they opened it up for competitive bidding last April [space.com]. We'll see how it works out.
*Artemis [wikipedia.org] needs flight suits by 2024, moon suits by 2025, and NASA's EMU [wikipedia.org] suits on the ISS are worn out. Of the original 18, seven have been scrapped and only four can be in working condition at a time due to a lack of parts. If ISS is to be extended past 2024 then they will need to be replaced.
**IIRC they created some new kind of fabric and a CO₂ extractor based on modern oxygen concentrators.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday June 05 2022, @12:56AM
Why NASA Will Pay $3.5Billion to Rent Space Suits Instead Of Building Their Own. [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]