(ORDO NEWS) — According to the plan, astronauts will fly to the ISS and the Moon in them.
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration has named companies that will build new spacesuits for the planned Artemis lunar missions and part of the International Space Station crew members.
Three and a half billion dollars will be spent on the development of new suits for astronauts. For comparison: the entire budget of the Mars 2020 mission, including the Perseverance rover, the Ingenuity helicopter-type unmanned aerial vehicle and other expensive devices, amounted to $ 2.7 billion.
“The suits have been an important milestone in every part of our human spaceflight programs,” Lindsey Aitchison, NASA spacesuit engineer and designer, said at the briefing.
And this is true: for 14 years of development, at least $ 400 million was spent on special suits for extravehicular activities on the surface of the Moon, but due to their unavailability, landing on the satellite of our planet had to be postponed.
In addition, last month the agency temporarily banned spacewalks on the International Space Station (an exception was made for emergency repairs).
All due to the fact that in March, when the American astronaut Raja Chari and his colleague from Germany Matthias Maurer were overboard for seven hours, a water leak occurred in one of the NASA Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits: moisture accumulated on the helmet-mounted sight.
A similar incident occurred in 2013 with European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano.
According to media reports, only 11 of NASA’s 18 spacesuits are currently available for use, five have been destroyed in space flights, one has been lost during ground tests, and another is being shipped as a certification unit.
According to the plan, the new special suits will replace the bulky old ones that were created 40 years ago, provide greater mobility, protect members of space missions, fit almost any physique and, according to the director of the Lyndon Johnson Space Center Vanessa Veech, “will go down in history” . They should be ready for testing on the ISS within a few years.
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