NASA’s Next Moonsuit Is Going to Be Damned Impressive

"NASA is preparing to send a woman and a man to the Moon in 2024, in what will
be the first mission to the lunar surface in 52 years. The new spacesuit being
designed for the mission is sleek and ultra high-tech, with a swath of features
not possible during the Apollo era. Here’s what you need to know about the
Artemis spacesuit and how it will take lunar exploration to the next level.

On December 14, 1972, when Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison
Schmitt lifted off from the lunar surface, no one in their right minds would
have believed it would take a half-century to do it again. But here we are, all
these decades later, as NASA prepares for the upcoming Artemis missions to
finally return humans to the Moon.

NASA, along with its various partners, are in the midst of developing the
requisite technologies to make it happen, including the gigantic SLS rocket, a
lunar lander (the Blue Origin-led project seems to be progressing nicely), an
unpressurized rover, and instruments to collect and sample water ice, among
other space toys. And of course, NASA is also working on its next lunar
spacesuit, which it’s calling the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or
xEMU for short.

NASA recently disclosed the cost of Artemis, saying the project will require $28
billion in funding from 2021 to 2025. Of this cost, $518 million will be
allocated to developing and manufacturing the xEMUs. That’s a hefty price tag,
considering NASA has prior experience building suits for the Apollo missions
and, more recently, for International Space Station astronauts. And indeed, xEMU
is visually similar to the suits worn by astronauts during ISS spacewalks, but
that’s basically where the comparison ends.

“The xEMU has been designed from the very beginning to be safer and have fewer
catastrophic failure modes than any of its predecessors,� Chris Hansen, the EVA
Office manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, explained in an email.
(EVA stands for extravehicular activity, which is NASA-speak for anything done
outside of a vehicle, whether that’s in Earth’s orbit or on the surface of
another planet.)"

See:

https://gizmodo.com/nasa-s-next-moon...ive-1845393104