FLORIDA – NASA have selected two companies to make spacesuits for astronaut in the Artemis moon program and future International Space Station (ISS) missions. The two companies, namely Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace (with ILC Dover as the main contributor) received contracts worth USD 3.5 billion or IDR 50.6 trillion.
The two companies will supply spacesuits for future NASA missions through 2034. Such as personal suits for shipping cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.
“But they have a greater chance of securing orders for demonstration missions beyond the ISS and the debut of the Artemis moon landing during the Artemis 3 mission, which is targeted to be carried out in 2025 or 2026,” NASA officials said during a press conference Thursday (2/6/2022). quoted from SINDOnews from the Space.com page.
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While development of the spacesuits is being carried out by the two companies, NASA will carry out joint certifications to ensure they are ready for the astronauts. “Then, once the astronaut suit is ready, it will be used,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Axiom Space is known to have carried out one private crewed mission to the ISS or the Ax-1 mission, which launched and landed in April 2022. Axiom Space is also working on another mission, namely the installation of a module on the ISS in 2024 as the core of a new space station that independent.
For the design of the space suit, Axiom Space says it will be made somewhat modular, as light and flexible as possible. Then, it will integrate input from astronauts and the aviation community to get better results.
“It shouldn’t feel like being on a spaceship. We wanted to be able to create an immersive environment that, for crew members, gave them the most mobility,” Dan Burbank, a senior technical fellow at Collins Aerospace and a retired NASA astronaut, told reporters.
Meanwhile, NASA officials said that this latest generation of spacesuits will be more flexible for various astronaut body sizes. It is known that NASA has only made one female space walk to date due to the limitations of suitable astronaut suits.
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