Posted on 07/17/2007 7:21:53 AM PDT by TChris
In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.
Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that.
Newman is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon. Her spandex and nylon BioSuit is not your grandfather's spacesuit--think more Spiderman, less John Glenn.
Traditional bulky spacesuits "do not afford the mobility and locomotion capability that astronauts need for partial gravity exploration missions. We really must design for greater mobility and enhanced human and robotic capability," Newman says.
Newman, her colleague Jeff Hoffman, her students and a local design firm, Trotti and Associates, have been working on the project for about seven years. Their prototypes are not yet ready for space travel, but demonstrate what they're trying to achieve--a lightweight, skintight suit that will allow astronauts to become truly mobile lunar and Mars explorers.
Newman anticipates that the BioSuit could be ready by the time humans are ready to launch an expedition to Mars, possibly in about 10 years. Current spacesuits could not handle the challenges of such an exploratory mission, Newman says.
(Excerpt) Read more at web.mit.edu ...
Spray on?
:-)
Dava Newman. For research purposes only....
I wouldn’t mind getting in to her space suit..........
‘Barbarella’ ping!
Hello, Newman.
They look funnier than hell but if it works...what an awesome breakthrough!
Paging Seven Of Nine...
Well, no, it's not a new idea at all. About 20 years ago I saw some old NASA test films (dating back to the '60s) of "skintight suits," based on exactly the same principles.
The suits worked OK for a while, but eventually the extremities -- hands especially -- began to swell so much that the test subject couldn't even get the gloves on, much less do anything with his hands.
The more things change....
Not guilty.
I’ll never forget the “Tang” commercial I heard maybe 15 years ago.........
“Sally Ride.....Tang in Space!”
The bigger suits also afford better protection from all the space junk that hits the shuttle and men in eva. How do they plan to address that?
They tried this approach 40+ years ago, and it didn't work. The most difficult hurdle is not the torso, but rather the hands, for which it is extremely difficult to make suitable gloves based on this technology.
I note the inclusion of knee pads...a wise choice.
I didn't know about the previous tries. That's interesting.
One thing I've noticed among engineers I've worked with is a propensity to reinvent the wheel, mostly because they're sure they can design a better wheel than the last guy. Some of them really don't like to use someone else's work, or trust their results.
I wonder if this is a result of the same kind of problem, or if it's simply a result of ignorance of the past attempts. (Libs aren't real keen on history and all that.)
They think they can do it, what with the advances in materials science. It would be great if they could do it..
If you lose pressure your blood literally boils- does she know that? This is a dumb story.
The new BioSuit builds on ideas developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Paul Webb, who first came up with the concept for a "space activity suit," and Saul Iberall, who postulated the lines of non-extension. However, neither the technology nor the materials were available then.
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