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DannyB [soylentnews.org] writes:

SpaceNews.com
NASA selects Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace for spacesuit contracts [spacenews.com]

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

[....] 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 plans to test its own spacesuit in orbit before then.

Without a bulky constrictive space suit, space is breathtaking!

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