Future Spacesuits Should Be Beautiful — and Not Just for Space. Here's Why

The stereotypical image of an astronaut is shaped by their spacesuit, with its puffy, white body and boxy backpack holding the life-support system.

Dava Newman, an aerospace engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wants to change that. She is designing what she hopes will be the next generation of spacesuits — which will give the life-saving devices the bulk and style of something more like athletic or camping equipment.

"We're going to Mars not to sit in the habitat — we're going there to explore," Newman said. "We don't want you to fight the suit. We want you to find life on Mars."

That design transition requires a change in the way the suits create pressure on the astronaut, which is done to keep an astronaut's blood liquid and moving throughout the body. (Without enough pressure, it could turn to gas.) For all of spaceflight to date, that pressure has come from filling the spacesuit with pure oxygen, putting the astronaut in a bubble of gas. Newman wants to create that pressure mechanically instead, with a suit that clings to skin.

We spoke with Newman about her research. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dava Newman: My passion is trying to think about how to get people to Mars, so what could I do? What would my contribution be? I love the current [spacesuit] system. I've studied it. To me, it's really the world's smallest spacecraft. As an aerospace engineer, the design challenge is how do you take all the functions of a spacecraft, miniaturize them and put them right around the person? It's an incredibly hard engineering and design challenge. Our current systems that are gas-pressurized shells are fantastic, both from NASA [and from] Russia. But for the last 50 years, we've had people in gas-pressurized suits. They keep them [the astronauts] alive, and they do great work, but they're really coming to the end of their life cycle. So we need new systems, and we have a couple design choices. We can kind of do it the same way and be incremental — not my choice — or say, "How else can we do it?"

Newman: This year, [20]18, [20]19, we're having some more mock-ups made that will be in a few museum exhibit shows. ... Those are just mock-up suits that look and feel like it. We have big goals for [20]19, [20]20 to really do prototypes that attain our 30 kilopascal [goal], a third of an atmosphere pressure production, so that's where the research continues. We have to implement some active materials, we have to use some functional fabrics, really creating some of our own fabrics and smart fibers. You can carry information; optical fibers are amazing. [You can also provide] a little bit of thermal management — just comfort, heating up, cooling people down. … And I mentioned before the life-support systems, so that's where the research is going. We'd like to prototype these systems to get much higher-fidelity systems that are eventually ready for flight.

Space.com: What sort of medical implications does your research have here on Earth? You've talked about students you work with at Harvard University who are studying to become aerospace biomedical engineers. What sort of projects have they worked on?

Newman: They love space. We call this "bioastronautics." We specialize in astronaut performance, suits, systems, exercise, countermeasures. … They've had really good medical training, so their interests are in Earth problems and how we can take our technologies, our experiments and perhaps run clinical experiments on rehabilitation, movement, control. The best theses have an aspect that's looking at a medical issue and an aspect looking at a space issue. [Newman described a project with Boston Children's Hospital trying to use spacesuit technology to help children born with cerebral palsy, a condition that affects motion and muscle control.]

They're not walking yet. Their brain is so plastic. Maybe if they go through certain motions and certain motor programs in our little suits — we did make suits for infants and take lots of measurements, because maybe we could help the range of motion — then, when the young person is about 2 years old and they start walking, maybe they would have extended range of motion and better muscle control and better muscle performance. … We're always thinking about how do we miniaturize things, how do we do wearable sensors. … Everything's so expensive to get in space. You don't get to fly a lot of instruments, so when you fly them, you really have to miniaturize them. And when you do, they just have great applications, usually, on Earth, for rural medicine, telemedicine, those kind of uses. That's exciting, because you feel like maybe we can make a difference on Earth.

Space.com: Aesthetics clearly play a role in your designs. Why is that important to you?

Newman:& It's always about teaming [up with others], because engineering, we solve some of the technical questions, the technologies, materials. But, yeah, I always work with designers and artists. It's a lot more fun. You want to wear beautiful things. You want to have a great suit and [one that] looks good. … It doesn't cost any extra money to do it right and do it very aesthetically, and I'm always learning as well from multidisciplinary teams, because bringing people together, they might have a different solution. I come at it usually from an analytical or technical [perspective], and you bring artists together, you bring designers, and they're going to really push us on form, functionality, things like this. So, we just make good teams — and have fun."

In the Trekkie universe there had long been chatter about Counselor Troi camel toe. They had gone through a number of wardrobe epic fails trying to figure out just how to dress her.

I thought that was an urban legend. Until I bought my first HDTV set. I was nodding off on the couch in front of TNG one evening when....

WHOOOOOAAAA......there it is!

I actually felt terrible for her. By reputation she’s a very nice woman.

Uh-oh......my buttons have been pushed.......

I hate to burst this young lady’s bubble, but REAL spacesuits are going to continue to look pretty much like the current ones. Those sexy skin-tight 1950’s spacesuits WON’T WORK!

These people look at a SCUBA divers wet suit, and think that a spacesuit should look like that. But the two problems are exactly opposite.

The SCUBA diver is going into a HIGH pressure environment, and his air regulator is going to give him air at the same pressure as the surrounding water. With no pressure differential, the diver can breathe normally.

The astronaut is going into a LOW pressure environment. As long as his chest is inside the pressurized “can”, he can also breathe normally. But if he tries to put on a skin-tight suit, and is breathing space-craft normal air (pure O2 at 5psi) when he steps into vacuum, his lungs will explode. This would be painful.......

Another problem I always see, not only with Hollywood spacesuits, but with NASA’s planned Mars suit, is that you can’t see your feet. And you are going to go stroll about on a surface covered with loose rocks of various sizes. This will not go well....

I think at least two of the Apollo astronauts managed to fall down on the Moon. Mars would be worse. Hope they send plenty of spare plastic bubbles for those helmets. At least that way, they can salvage the suit......

After cleaning it out.

space-craft normal air (pure O2 at 5psi)

We don’t use 100% O2 at any pressure.

The Apollo program was put on hold while an exhaustive investigation was made of the accident. It was concluded that the most likely cause was a spark from a short circuit in a bundle of wires that ran to the left and just in front of Grissom's seat. The large amount of flammable material in the cabin in the oxygen environment allowed the fire to start and spread quickly. A number of changes were instigated in the program over the next year and a half, including designing a new hatch which opened outward and could be operated quickly, removing much of the flammable material and replacing it with self-extinguishing components, using a nitrogen-oxygen mixture at launch, and recording all changes and overseeing all modifications to the spacecraft design more rigorously.

It’s almost like They knew something was going to happen

Detailed Fire and aftermath Info

Post Fire Picture (WARNING VERY GRAPHIC)

Another Post Fire Picture (AGAIN, WARNING VERY GRAPHIC)

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