Life beyond Earth’s atmosphere needn’t be one swathed in a cumbersome suit with
little movement. Helen Cahill checks out the latest in spacefaring gearSUITING
UP FOR
SPACE
HELMET
The team is crafting a slim-fitting,
gas-pressured helmet. Astronauts
will need to be able to look over their
shoulders, which means creating an
airtight joint between the helmet and
the BioSuit’s body.BODY
Dr Karl Langer – a 19th Century
anatomist – investigated and plotted
the tension lines in human skin.
His work inspired the pattern of
reinforcing metal support-lines in the
suit, marking critical strain points.BACKPACK
A modular system so astronauts
need only carry what they need
and can quickly change bottles of
oxygen on longer missions.King’s College
students sport the
elastic space suits23PHOTO: DAVA NEWMAN/NASA, KINGS COLLEGE LONDON1When astronauts aren’t exploring
the planetary landscape in their
outdoor apparel, they’re unwinding
in the Space Station. Unfortunately,
they literally waste away in their
downtime. Muscles and bones
need to counter gravity’s pull to
stay in shape – they deteriorate if
unused. What’s more, astronauts
can grow by up to 7cm in space,
as gravity is no longer loading their
spine.Once they’re back on Earth
astronauts are then four times
more likely to get a slipped disc.
To overcome these problems,
teams at King’s College London
and MIT have designed this form-
fixing skinsuit. “It essentially seeks
to replace the compressive force of
gravity on the body’s length,” says
Dr David Green at King’s College
London. With straps around the
feet, the elastic suit is intentionally
made too short so that it stretches
when worn, pulling your shoulders
to your feet. The suit’s leg fabric
also extends more than the
torso’s, so your legs bear a larger
force. This reproduces gravity’s
effect on Earth. “The force of
gravity increases as you move
down the body towards the feet,”
says Green.
Andreas Mogensen of the
European Space Agency will be
the first to don the outfit when he
embarks on a space mission in- If successful, UK astronaut
Tim Peake may wear the suit when
he goes to the International Space
Station later in 2015.
SPACE STATION SUIT
Dava newman’s skin-tight
space suit – the BioSuit – defies
conventional aesthetics of
astronaut attire. No more Michelin
men bumbling across the surface
of the Moon. The era of sleeker
space-explorers has begun,
and Newman envisages them
rocketing to Mars in her form-
fitting outfits.
NASA doesn’t make its existing
suit, the Extravehicular Mobility
Unit (EMU), in a petite size, but
Newman wants to enable women
below 5ft 5in (1.6m), like herself,
to explore Mars.
Her chief aim, though, is to give
astronauts more mobility. Space is
a vacuum, so the suit needs to
provide the pressure astronauts
require to stop their bodies
expanding. The EMU uses gas for
this purpose, which makes it an
unbearably clunky contraption.
Additionally, wearers are
unbalanced by their weighty life-
support backpacks.
Newman’s team of physicists
and designers propose a
mechanical counter-pressure
spacesuit, which uses elasticfabrics, rather than gas, to
pressurise the astronaut. They are
fashioning it out of spandex, nylon
and a newly patented material.
The uniform’s pattern is from the
supports that reinforce strain
points on the body. These features
help provide the required amount
of pressure – about a third of sea-
level atmospheric pressure.
“I’d love to see a BioSuit
worn on the first human mission
to Mars, or on a commercial
space flight much sooner,” says
Newman.FLEXIBLE BIOSUIT