Current Spacesuits Won’t Cut It on the Moon. So NASA Made New Ones
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil:
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.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.