Bye bye to bunny hops: When U.S. astronauts next touch down on the Moon, expect them to walk almost as they do on Earth, thanks to a new generation of spacesuits offering key advantages over those of the Apollo-era.
Prototypes of the Orion Crew Survival Suit that will be worn on the journey and the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) for the lunar surface were unveiled at NASA's Washington headquarters Tuesday ahead of the agency's planned return to the Moon by 2024.
One suit of orange fabric will be worn by astronauts when inside the spacecraft. Astronauts will wear a much bigger mostly white suit on the lunar surface.
Advanced Space Suit Engineer at NASA Kristine Davis wears the pressurized red, blue and white xEMU suit in front of a U.S. flag. /Reuters Photo
Standing in front of a giant U.S. flag, spacesuit engineer Kristine Davis wore the pressurized red, blue and white xEMU suit, showing off a vastly improved range of motion thanks to bearings systems on the waist, arms, and legs.
They are also extendable and therefore one-size-fits-all, meaning there won't be a repeat of an embarrassing flub in March that caused the first all-female spacewalk to be aborted when a second medium-sized suit wasn't available.
"If we remember the Apollo generation, we remember Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, they bunny hopped on the surface of the Moon," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a hall filled with students and interns at the space agency.
"Now we're going to be able to walk on the surface of the Moon, which is very different from the suits of the past."
Another key innovation is the xEMU's unlimited capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, a byproduct of respiration that is also poisonous in high quantities.
It achieves this through a system that both absorbs and then removes the gas into the vacuum of space, unlike current systems that merely absorb it until it reaches a saturation point.
The crew survival suit, meanwhile, is designed to provide full life support for up to six days – a scenario that could be required, for example, if a meteorite punches a hole in the spacecraft's hull.
Kristine Davis is helped out of a space suit after a press conference displaying the next generation of space suits as parts of the Artemis mission in Washington. /AFP Photo
The new suits come as a much-needed upgrade to NASA's astronaut wardrobe. Astronauts Christina Koch and Anne McClain were slated in March to conduct the first ever all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station, but the mission was called off because there weren't enough spacesuits available on the station for both of them.
Another attempt for the first all-female spacewalk, a roughly six-hour crawl on the exterior of the space station to install new batteries, is back on for Thursday, NASA said in a news release on Tuesday.
Under the Artemis mission, NASA plans to land on the Moon's South Pole in order to exploit its water ice, discovered in 2009, both for life support purposes and to split into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket propellant.
The agency views its return to the Moon as a proving ground for an onward mission to Mars in the 2030s.
(With input from AFP, Reuters)