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NASA Engineers Work on New Spacesuits
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Mar 26, 2007 07:15 AM
from the avoiding-diaper-jokes dept.
from the avoiding-diaper-jokes dept.
NotCoward writes "In labs at Johnson Space Center, away from the buzz about NASA's new spaceship and its new missions to the moon and Mars, a group of engineers are plodding away at another piece of the puzzle: spacesuits. Astronaut apparel has evolved over the decades from Mercury's aluminum foil-looking outfits to the bulky, 275-pound whites now used on jaunts outside the space station. While it's too early in the process to know how the new space suits will look, the space agency is hoping to make new suits both high-tech and low-maintenance."
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MIT Team Designs a New, Sleek, Skintight Spacesuit 383 comments
iamdrscience writes "MIT aeronautics professor Dava Newman has designed a new spacesuit along with her colleague, Jeff Hoffman and a group of students. This is far sleeker and lighter weight than the suits used by astronauts today, promising greater mobility than the traditional bulky suits of today which can weigh 300lbs or more. Instead of gas pressurization, the new prototype BioSuit employs "mechanical counter-pressure" in the form of skin-tight layers wrapped around the body."
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html
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Fishbowl helmets yet? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fishbowl helmets yet? (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose current generation astronauts just need to see whatever they working on, which is right in front of them. But I'd think that it would be psychologically uncomfortable to have your awareness of what is going on to either side cut off for long periods at a time. What if some evil, tentacled creature crawled out of a crater and was heading right for you? You'd never see it.
Not to mention the risk of getting run over by a moon buggy while you are crossing the grounds of your base.
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ewwww....
Re:Fishbowl helmets yet? (Score:5, Informative)
1) Hard shell: These suits look like sci-fi powered armor, minus the power. There's already a few suits like this used for deep-sea diving. A hard shell suit is a rigid exoskeleton with smooth-sliding ball joints. The joints are the hardest point of the design, as you can't afford for them to leak, but you can't afford for them to resist your motion much, either. It takes many joints for a good suit to not constrain the wearers' motion too heavily.
2) Skintight: Like in retro sci-fi where everyone walks around in spandex, this is actually a serious design. The tight suit itself provides direct pressure on the body. Even better, the fabric is slightly porous so that you can sweat into the vaccuum of space, so you don't need cooling. There's one big downside that has prevented widespread adoption of such suits: they're currently almost impossible to get on or off. Such a suit, to be practical, would need to be made of a fabric that can change size when exposed to a certain stimulus (electricity, air pressure, etc).
Parent
Re:Fishbowl helmets yet? (Score:5, Funny)
Speaking of retaining the bladder, will new designs incorporate strategically-located zippers? Or are we still going the Depends (tm) route? There's just something non-sexy about being a pee-pee-pants in space.
Parent
Re:Fishbowl helmets yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno about the actual work done on the skintight suits. Divers wear pretty tight outfits, and they manage somehow. Has any engineering been done in the last twenty years? As you say, new material are available.
With a skintight suit, you could throw on a "parka" in the freezing shade, or wear a beadouin's cloak in the harsh sunlight. On Mars, you could toss on a really well insulated snowsuit and some good boots. In contruction zones in zero g or the moon, you could wear some sports armor to guard your knees and elbows.
A skintight would be a lot less fatiguing to wear, be lighter to carry, leaks aren't the spectacular death that hardshell wearers worry over, and importantly, you can turn yor head. And if it were comfortable enough to wear full time, explosive decompression of the ship or habitat would be handled by slapping down your visor rather than, oh, dying 'cause it takes 90 minutes to suit up.
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Liquid Oxygen (Score:5, Interesting)
The apollo suits used two tanks of gaseous oxygen. The main tank at just over 1000 psi and the OPS backup tank at 6000 psi. The main tank was filled from a hose inside the LM. The OPS tank was filled once only on the ground.
EVA time was limited first by the quantity of water for the sublimators and second by oxygen quantity. The battery life was also a limiting factor, but I think it came third by a long margin.
Its not hard to carry more water for cooling. The reason it was in short supply on the moon was that the original designs for the PLSS didn't allow enough space.
But those high pressure oxygen tanks are a real pain. The structure contributes to the overall mass. The volume pushes the mass up because it takes space. Temperature is a problem anyway because it increases gas pressure and reduces density.
So if we are designing new suits I think we should find ways of stocking them with LOX. Probably in something like a vacuum flask. Maybe that is the next big step.
I for one welcome our (Score:2)
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In-suit coffee makers.
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As in any redox reaction, the exhaust -- CO2 in this case -- is a lower energy state. Moving the process in the opposite would require quite a bit of energy. In a small device like a space suit, the only practical source of large amounts of energy is a chemical reaction. So now we'
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For example, a spaceship on a journey to mars, powered by a nuclear reactor could indeed use a system to split CO2/H20 back into C, H2, and O2. It'd take loads of juice and likely be quite bulky, but it'd work. You stick the hydrogen into the fuel tanks, breath the O2 again, and either store or eject the carbon. It might even make sense over carrying six months to two years* of O2. This is, of course, assuming that we don't go the organic
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Possibly. (Score:2)
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FTFA... (Score:4, Interesting)
From the article...
It will be interesting to see what type of designs they come up with and how they will strip the suits of a good 125-130 pounds. It would be funny to see them go back to something more retro looking like the new Spaceshuttle they're building. =p
Sound advice... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Anything you forget to take with you will kill you; anything you do remember to bring but that doesn't work will kill you; and if you're in any doubt, assume everything will kill you."
Sound advice, although I suspect the missus takes it to heart whenever we go on holiday for a weekend.
"275-pound[s]"? That sounds awfully cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
Wven with the current USD-Sterling exchange rate.
Wait... did you mean that it "weighs" 39.2857 cloves [clara.net]?
Seriously; can we please try to use metric consistently, as NASA are finally doing themselves.
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Yes but . . . (Score:5, Funny)
You never know when an astronaut might need those things.
(I'm assuming the diapers will still be included.)
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No User Servicable Parts Inside (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing like setting out with two mutually exclusive goals.
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Certification (Score:2)
What costs in NASA equipment is not only the tech or maintenance of it, but all the certifications that make sure that critical equipment won't fail unexpectedly at the worse possible time.
And the space suit seems to be one of those things that must have redundancy and extremely low and predictable failure rate.
Re:No User Servicable Parts Inside (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Mars hyperbole (Score:2, Insightful)
For one thing, Mars has an atmosphere. Not directly breathable, of course... but not toxic either. So there's no need for Mars explorers to carry both oxygen AND "bulk" gas (like nitrogen) to give it volume and pressure. Instead, they can do what airplanes do... pressurize the outside air, warm it up, and inject small amounts of pure oxygen into it.
Likewise, a suit for outdoor use on Mars doesn
Re:Mars hyperbole (Score:5, Informative)
Mars' atmosphere is a lot thinner than Earth's, and the pressure at surface level is only 0.6% of Earth's. Even if supplied with breathable air, and heating, you wouldn't survive in the martian environment due to the extremely low pressure. The suits *have* to be airtight.
Parent
Re:Mars hyperbole (Score:5, Interesting)
The suits *have* to be airtight.
You might be surprised to learn that this is not the case. Human skin is fairly resistant to vacuum. Abrasion, radiation protection, thermal insulation are more important considerations. Please read this article on space activity suits [wikipedia.org].
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I for one would fully expect, nay demand, that even the most microscopic of punctures in the suits skin must quickly lead to blood curdling screams followed by the astronaught either gratuitiously exploding within their suit, or the suit itself rupturing and spraying copious amounts of gore in all directions. Furthermore, the screams and sounds of exploding organs should carry across the
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> before dying the quick but allegedly-painful death of CO2 poisoning. The atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide.
Oops. Guilty as charged. For some inane reason I thought it was mostly nitrogen.
On the other hand, CO2 is even better, because CO2 can be converted into molecular Oxygen through direct electrolysis. So... the hardware for quick jaunts outside is more complex than it would be under
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You have already been taken to task about parts of this, but not on one. Keep in mind, that none of the space suits store "bulk" gas. The N2 that is in the air is not used by us. It enters our lungs and generally exits in the same concentrations. All in all, you use the N2 that you entered with. But the CO2 needs to removed and O2 injected. All you store on any of these suits is O2, Of which there is damn little in th
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Wishful thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
There's one little problem with this. A suit designed for vacuum won't work properly on Mars. The Apollo suits (and STS/ISS EVA suits) use a form of insulation that will cause major user overheating in Mars' atmosphere. Also, most proposed Mars suits would use a life support system more like SCUBA tanks than current spacesuits, extremely low-power, easily re-filled and simple to maintain. It's more than just swapping out the upper parts of the suit based on task, some of what the article proposes won't work. The fundamental differences in environments will seriously hinder that plan.
Another issue is that for a single-suit strategy this means that the astronauts coming back from the Moon will be bringing their filthy suits back with them. This means several days of breathing the dust, plus the dust will saturate the Orion capsule's cabin. Not a good plan for a reusable vehicle.
Some of these issues can be resolved, others are just the different natures of the planets. Can tech developed for lunar exploration help with Mars? Sure, but it's not going to be the same spacesuits across all uses. Interfaces, communications, maybe parts of the life support pack, materials and assembly techniques will find crossover. The thing you don't want is to land on Mars only to realize that the vacuum-insulation in your suits is totally wrong and you can't do EVA without overheating. Even the difference between orbital suits and the lunar suits are huge, they are all different environments.
The right suit for Mars is based, IMHO, around Mechanical Counter-Pressure (MCP) principals instead of constant-volume balloon suits. The MIT "BioSuit" and NASA's old Space Activity Suit are excellent examples. MCP suits (and SCUBA-type air supply) are the only current approaches that can lead to sub-100lb (~40kg for you metrics) suits for Mars exploration. The only spacesuit concept that might work across environments would be a Newtsuit-type hard suit, and even then it's going to be heavy.
Josh
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NASA could easily have in mind a suit that is component oriented for multiple environments.
Who needs new shuttles? (Score:4, Funny)
2. Wander around on Earth until ETs pick them up
3. Will travel!
AIAA covered this a year ago (Score:3, Informative)
As if manned spaceflight isn't dead (Score:2)
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The trouble is that an Astronaut in a spacesuit can't actually do a lot. For an example, put on a pair of boxing gloves and try and wire a three pin plug.
--
Malda: why are my posts stuck in pending for ages
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Seriously, how 'bout 20 years from now I look you up and cook you a nice dinner of "Incontinent Truth" DVD's, and paper printouts of your comment?
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