One of NASA’s new spacesuits passes microgravity test
Collins Aerospace, a private company hired to create spacesuits for use outside the International Space Station (ISS), has tested its suit aboard a commercial microgravity flight, passing a milestone that lets engineers move forward toward critical design review.
NASA outsourced the design of new spacesuits in 2022 after spending 15 years trying to develop new suits on its own. Collins Aerospace said the suit is lighter and has less volume than the “enhanced” Extravehicular Mobility Units that current NASA astronauts use. It can be modified when missions change and fit a much wider range of body types far more easily than the older suits that are based on designs that are decades old.
During the test, the plane executed “roller-coaster-like maneuvers” to induce weightlessness and allow someone wearing a prototype to see if it actually lets someone move around in it under those conditions. As seen in the video below, they tried things like navigating through doors in zero-G.
Collins Aerospace’s next test will put the suit in a vacuum chamber to see how it performs in the vacuum of space, while a test under 40 feet of water at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Texas will simulate microgravity for spacewalk training.
Collins Aerospace, a private company hired to create spacesuits for use outside the International Space Station (ISS), has tested its suit aboard a commercial microgravity flight, passing a milestone that lets engineers move forward toward critical design review. NASA outsourced the design of new spacesuits in 2022 after spending 15…
Recent Posts
- RAMBO attack uses RAM in air-gapped computers to steal data
- You don’t need to replace your AirPods Max to get a splash of the new colors
- The Life of Chuck dances through the end of the world
- Sony’s $700 PlayStation 5 Pro Is Finally Coming in November
- Meta showcases the hardware that will power recommendations for Facebook and Instagram — low-cost RISC-V cores and mainstream LPDDR5 memory are at the heart of its MTIA recommendation inference CPU
Archives
- September 2024
- August 2024
- July 2024
- June 2024
- May 2024
- April 2024
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- September 2018
- December 2011