NASA
On Wednesday, NASA took another step toward landing humans on the moon when the agency announced a plan to purchase new and more versatile spacesuits for its astronauts.
After more than a decade of work to develop a new spacesuit internally, NASA said it would instead purchase spacesuit services from two private companies, Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace.
Each of these companies will be able to use the technology that NASA has been working on, but are responsible for the overall development of the spacesuits used on the International Space Station and activities on the lunar surface. Axiom and Collins said they plan to demonstrate their spacesuits for NASA — likely in the form of a spacewalk outside the space station — by 2025.
These will be NASA’s first new spacesuits in decades. “The previous suit had been the workhorse for 40 years,” NASA’s Johnson Space Center director Vanessa Wyche said at a news conference. “These new capabilities allow us to continue on the ISS and allow us to do the Artemis program and move on to Mars.”
As part of NASA’s ongoing embrace of commercial space and the goal of becoming “one of many” spaceflight customers, NASA will provide a limited amount of guaranteed funding to support spacesuit programs at Axiom and Collins. However, most of the funding will be disbursed through job orders between now and 2034. Wednesday’s announcement means both companies are eligible to bid for spacesuit services, including ongoing maintenance, for Artemis missions to the Moon and off-vehicle ISS operations. The contract for all job orders has a cap of $3.5 billion.
NASA will make some demands on the spacesuits, but leave the overall design decisions to the companies. This is part of the agency’s goal to give private companies the freedom to innovate and design spacesuits that meet the needs of NASA and those of private customers. By leaning on the greater efficiency of the private sector, NASA hopes to work faster and get better value for the taxpayer. One hard requirement, however, is a flexible design that can accommodate astronauts of all sizes: The new suits must fit a woman in the fifth percentile to a man in the 95th percentile.
The winners
Axiom Space is already building its own private space station, and its CEO, Mike Suffredini, said on Wednesday that the company’s customers would definitely like to take spacewalks. The award of the contract means Axiom can hire an additional 300 employees to work on the spacesuit project, which now also has to work in the dusty environment on the moon’s surface. Axiom partners include KBR, Air-Lock, the David Clark Company and Paragon Space Development Corporation.
“It’s fantastic to have a partnership where you can take advantage of the years of experience that NASA has and all the work they’ve done to get the design to where it is today,” Suffredini said. “And then we as a commercial company can come in and work with them to build it in a way at the lowest cost so that we can both use the suit to meet our needs.”
The other winner was Collins Aerospace, who will lead a team made up of ILC Dover and Oceaneering. These three companies have experience building spacesuits, with Collins designing the Apollo spacesuits used during the first moon landings. Although Collins does not have a private space station, it plans to offer its suits to other companies who plan to build them in low-Earth orbit, said Dan Burbank, senior engineering fellow for the company.
The companies beat out many other bidders for this opportunity. More than 40 companies were listed as “interested parties” when NASA first announced the private spacesuit program, formally known as the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contract. Other interested parties included Blue Origin, Honeywell Aerospace, Leidos, Sierra Space and SpaceX.
A long road to new suits
NASA has been running several programs over the past 14 years, mostly led by a NASA field center, to develop a new generation of spacesuits. During that time, NASA has spent $420 million on various spacesuit efforts, but has yielded limited results. Until earlier last year, NASA’s existing plan was to build six “xEMU” suits with support from contractors and suppliers and then issue a contract to manufacture additional suits.
Ultimately, however, it became clear that the space agency should share what it learned through xEMU with the industry and take development from there, said Lara Kearney, manager of the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. †
“We never intended for the government to be a production house,” she said. “So we knew there would always be a transition to industry in our future. The question was when that transition would have to happen. We decided with the amount of knowledge we had gained from xEMU that we could hand it over to these guys, and that would kickstart them. And the sooner we got them on track to actually deliver flight suits, the more likely we were to meet our schedule.”
NASA’s current timeline has the Artemis III mission landing two astronauts on the moon in 2025. However, independent assessments of the Artemis program say this date could be more ambitious than realistic due to several factors, including the readiness of a lunar lander and spacesuits capable of handling moon dust.
