Spacesuits are important if you leave Earth’s protective atmosphere. Human-size miniature spaceships, they provide protection against intensive solar radiation, extreme temperatures, low pressure from the vacuum of space and impact from micrometeorites.
On the Moon, there’s also the problem of highly abrasive lunar dust, which can destroy bearing joints in suits and degrade their materials.
A spacesuit should allow excellent freedom of movement for the wearer, who may often have to go on spacewalks outside their ship to perform delicate equipment repairs.
It also helps if it’s quick to put on, in case there’s an emergency. And it should also feature a full life-support system to maintain internal air and temperature.
An astronaut may have to wear a spacesuit for many hours, so it needs to cater for food, rehydration and other bodily functions…
Over the years, there have been a lot of different designs, not all of them exactly fulfilling these criteria.
Back in 1962, a bizarre hard-shelled suit known as the Grumman was briefly tested. Looking like a cross between a dustbin and a blender, it had extremely limited freedom of movement.
Other hard-shelled ‘AX’ suits were tried, resembling futuristic suits of armour and often made of aluminium with rotary joints, but none ever made it on a mission – they were just too bulky and had too many joints to seize up.
Instead, most real spacesuits were made from flexible, multilayer composite fabrics with hard shells limited to areas such as the head and upper torso.
Future suits may be more robust.
Researchers are currently attempting to develop new self-healing materials so that damage will never be a problem for long missions to Mars. But perhaps the most exotic is the BioSuit proposed by Prof Dava Newman at MIT.
Astronauts would don a stretchy fabric suit, which when activated by an electric current, shrinks embedded shape memory alloy coils to become skin-tight for the ultimate in unrestricted movement, not to mention space-chic.
Alternatively, the suit with the most yuck-factor is one with a proposed FO-RO (forward and reverse osmosis) unit.
Much like the Stillsuit from Dune – you guessed it – this suit recycles the astronaut’s pee back into drinking water.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Erica Morris, via email) 'What will spacesuits of the future look like?'
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