NASA’s spacesuit technology is 40 years old. These 2 companies with Houston ties will change that.

Together, the companies could receive up to $3.5 billion through 2034.“The previous suit, for 40 years, has been the workhorse,” Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche said during a news conference. “The history will be made with these (new) suits when we get to the moon. We will have our first person of color and our first woman that will be wearers and users of these suits.”

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NASA officials have long recognized that its spacesuits needed an upgrade. Those worn by astronauts that step outside the International Space Station were initially designed for use with the space shuttle. They don’t always fit astronauts comfortably, they can be difficult to get into and a recent malfunction has prompted a NASA review.

After completing a March 23 spacewalk, European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer returned to the station to discover a thin layer of water — more than normal — inside his helmet. The agency will review this issue and possible fixes before resuming normal spacewalk operations.

“We’d like to try new future technologies,” said Dina Contella, operations integration manager for NASA’s International Space Station Program. “We’d like to do it in an affordable way. And so this contract is actually a great part of our strategy for ISS for maintaining and utilizing the space station for years to come.”

NASA has spent the past 15 years researching new spacesuit technology.

Its plan was to create a reference design or prototype that the private sector could use to build suits, but that plan pivoted when former President Donald Trump challenged NASA to return to the moon by 2024. NASA decided at that time it would send its reference suit to the moon to meet the condensed timeline.

The agency pivoted again after NASA made significant progress on its prototype and pushed the moon landing to no sooner than 2025. NASA decided companies could build the suits after all. But in a departure from NASA’s previous spacesuits, which were built by contractors and owned by the agency, these suits will be owned by the companies that build them. NASA hopes its astronauts will be one of many customers wearing the suits.

Axiom Space CEO Michael Suffredini praised this public-private partnership. His Houston-based company is sending private astronauts to the International Space Station and is building its own commercial space station. These suits will benefit both NASA and Axiom Space.

“We have a number of customers that already would like to do a spacewalk, and we had planned to build a suit as part of our program,” Suffredini said. “It’s fantastic to have a partnership where we can benefit from the years of experience that NASA has … and then (we) as a commercial company come in and work with them to build it in a way that’s (at the) lowest cost.”

Axiom will begin building the suits at its current Houston facilities and then move this work to the Houston Spaceport when its new headquarters campus opens. Axiom plans to complete the first phase of its construction by April 2023.

Charlotte, N.C.-based Collins Aerospace, which has helped build spacesuits for Apollo, space shuttle and International Space Station astronauts, plans to move into its Houston Spaceport location in the third quarter of this year. Much of its spacesuit assembly, maintenance and testing will be done at the new Houston location.

Spacesuits operate like human-shaped spacecraft. Yet Dan Burbank, senior technical fellow for Collins Aerospace and a former NASA astronaut, said they should compliment — not constrain — a crew member’s capabilities.

This has been an issue in the past.

Apollo astronauts had custom suits, but they weren’t always easy to move around in or flexible. Astronauts had to fall over to collect rocks from the moon.

Current suits have a one-size-fits-many approach, which can be an issue as astronauts’ elbows and shoulders don’t fall in the same places. Former NASA astronaut Bonnie J. Dunbar previously told the Chronicle that the suit’s elbows didn’t bend where her elbows bent. And an ill-fitting suit can cause astronauts to waste energy. Other astronauts have reported shoulder injuries from the ill-fitting suits.

In addition, many women (plus some men) became ineligible for spacewalks after NASA changed the available sizes. There were initially five sizes for the suit’s hard upper torso — extra small, small, medium, large and extra large — but budget cuts reduced those offered to just medium, large and extra large.

These three sizes are still used today on the International Space Station. In 2019, NASA had to reschedule its first all-female spacewalk after discovering that only one medium hard upper torso, which both women required, was on the International Space Station.

MORE: NASA canceled its first all-female spacewalk. Why? It didn't have anything that fit

Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace plan to address these issues in their designs. Burbank said he participated in a test on Wednesday where one suit was resized in about 30 minutes from his taller height to fit someone with a shorter stature.

“To get the cost where you need it to be, the challenge is to have a modular approach that does allow that full indexability and full tailorability,” he said. “It’s actually very promising.”

NASA has done a lot of the legwork for these companies, which are building upon the agency’s reference suits, but there is a tight deadline to meet.

NASA wants to return to the moon in 2025. Yet NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said in January that the time needed to develop and test these suits — as well as the landing system that will lower astronauts to the moon — could contribute to astronauts not returning to the moon before 2026.

NASA officials hope that sharing the agency’s spacesuit data will accelerate the companies’ development, said Lara Kearney, manager of the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“Getting it in their hands sooner, I think, is better,” she said, “because they take ownership of it sooner. And so they start to run on that path to hitting a deadline.”

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