NASA unveils new spacesuit design, updating decades-old tech for upcoming moon missions

The space agency and private contractor Axiom hope the new, more mobile suit will be ready for a planned return to the moon in 2025.

On Wednesday morning, an engineer with private space company Axiom walked out onto a stage at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, smiling from behind a domed helmet and visor. He was demonstrating a prototype of a new spacesuit, intended for use in the Artemis III mission slated for 2025, which will send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in more than half a century.

Though NASA awarded Axiom the contract to develop the new suit only last year, the reveal builds on many years of work, and many dollars spent, to update the agency’s existing spacesuits for new requirements and a more diverse crew of astronauts. But spacesuit development in the post-space shuttle era has proved to be particularly tricky. In fact, this was NASA’s second such reveal of a new suit, with NASA unveiling a prototype in 2019 before the more recent pivot to bring Axiom in.

Still, Axiom officials on Wednesday said they plan to have the suit ready to go for the 2025 launch to the moon in the midst of a re-energized global space race. China, which has built the Tiangong space station, also has kicked around the idea of building a lunar research station to compete with a similar facility proposed as part of the Artemis mission.

“We have not had a new suit since the suits that we designed for the space shuttle, and those suits are currently in use on the [International] Space Station. Forty years we’ve been using the same suit, based on that technology,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson Space Center, during the event on Wednesday. Axiom’s new suit, she said, will have “more functionality, more performance, more capability, and we’re very excited.”

Dated and discriminatory technology

The existing spacesuits in use aboard the space station and during the space shuttle’s lifetime focused on use in microgravity, and thus had very little mobility in the waist and legs. With walking around on the moon as a new goal, that needed to change.

For 40 years, “we didn’t have a different destination to go to. And now we do. So that also brings in a new set of requirements,” said Ana Diaz Artiles, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University, who works on modernizing spacesuit design. “The current suit wasn’t designed … to go to the moon.”

Image of astronaut standing on the moon next to the US flag and a spacecraft — Astronaut David Scott salutes beside the U.S. flag during the Apollo 15 mission on July 30, 1971, on the moon.

In general, the existing suits seemed in dire need of an upgrade. In fact, at one point last year, NASA suspended all but the most urgent spacewalks on the International Space Station after water was found in an astronaut’s helmet during a previous walk.

Aside from addressing the current suits’ dated functionality, the upgrade also is intended to address how earlier spacesuits were generally designed with men in mind. Women now make up a far greater proportion of astronauts than they did in the past.

“The current spacesuit, there are just a few sizes,” Diaz Artiles told Grid. “Some small female astronauts particularly have had lots of issues.”

In 2019, NASA had to scrub the first-ever all-female spacewalk due to a lack of appropriately sized suits. The uproar over this cancellation highlighted the issue of a more diverse astronaut crew, though it in fact had more to do with the time required to ready a second medium-sized spacesuit for the walk. Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir did eventually set that milestone, in October of 2019. NASA has yet to announce specifically who will board Artemis II — which will orbit the moon without landing — and Artemis III, but they will pull from a diverse pool of 18 astronauts. The agency has said it intends for Artemis to land the first woman and the first person of color on the moon, in preparation for future missions to Mars.

More mobile, better fits

In September 2022, NASA issued its first “task order” to Axiom, worth $228 million from a larger $1.26 billion NASA Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVA) contract, calling for development of its new suit. The resulting prototype demonstrated on Wednesday did indeed appear far more mobile than the bulky suits in use on the space station; the Axiom engineer inside the suit walked smoothly, bent at the waist, and knelt down, actions that could be important during various scientific missions on the lunar surface.

The suit uses a hatch design, meaning a sort of backpack opens up on a set of hinges and allows the astronaut to shimmy inside it, closing the hatch behind them. That backpack also houses much of the life support system, which Axiom said has been almost totally revamped.

“It would almost be easier to tell you what’s not revolutionary,” said Russell Ralston, Axiom’s deputy EVA program manager, during a press event. Along with the joint designs and other mobility issues, he specifically cited the water membrane evaporator, which provides cooling to the avionics inside the suit and to the crew member themself. “That component was in development for almost two decades,” Ralston said. “That component is remarkable new technology.”

Axiom officials noted that the new suits will cover a wide range of sizes as well, and individual parts of it will be at least somewhat adjustable, to account for more difference in body type and size. And since the question did come up during the press event on Wednesday — Axiom’s suits will not update the use of diapers in spacesuits. “Sometimes simplest is best,” one Axiom representative said.

Notably, the suit unveiled in Houston on Wednesday is still just a prototype, and its stylish black and orange outer layer will be replaced by an insulating white layer, reminiscent of older spacesuits, by the time its redesigned boots touch moon dust.

Smoother sailing ahead?

Axiom’s reveal seems to indicate relatively rapid progress, given the recently awarded contract. But spacesuits are tricky, given their need to their users alive and keep the freezing vacuum of space out. Those challenges have meant slow development in the past; a report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) in August 2021 noted that NASA’s efforts to develop a next-generation suit would almost certainly not be completed in time for the scheduled Artemis launches — though it noted that plenty of other pieces of the mission such as a new Orion capsule could also act as limiting steps.

Allowing private companies to get more involved also likely accelerates the timelines involved, as has been demonstrated with SpaceX’s now-commonplace launches sending supplies and astronauts to the space station. “I think giving the work to industry is going to accelerate all these processes,” Diaz Artiles said.

Development of the suit is also spectacularly expensive. The OIG report said that NASA would spend more than $1 billion by the time the new suit is developed; the overall xEVA contract has a ceiling of $3.5 billion, spread over 10 years with another two years allowed for delivery. Whether that investment can pay off in time for the planned launches remains to be seen — but the company, and NASA, are confident.

“NASA is working very, very hard to ensure that we keep Artemis III on track,” said NASA associate administrator Bob Cabana on Wednesday. “Our goal is to have the first woman and next man back on the surface of the moon on Artemis III in 2025.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

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NASA unveils new spacesuit design, updating decades-old tech for upcoming moon missions