What is the future of spacesuits? Flexible and lightweight!

After Apollo’s feat of the moon, people have been exploring more far-reaching space. For example, the United States continues to promote the development of new technologies and systems with the landing of manned Mars as a long-term goal, and will aim at the more distant objects of the solar system. It is foreseeable that in the future, humanity will step on more planets.

As an indispensable protective device for manned spaceflight, these new space exploration activities require more advanced spacesuits to meet the challenges of different space environments, such as Mars gravity is only 1/3 of the Earth, and its space environment has high CO2 content. 95% of the micro-vacuum atmosphere, large temperature difference (-120 ~ 20 ° C), dust storm and micro-meteor damage and extremely strong radiation environment, etc., put forward strict requirements for the design of Mars space suit. In addition, due to the frequent extravehicular exploration activities in the space station era, the future spacesuits must not only meet the new requirements of the new space environment for the function of spacesuits, but also reduce the weight and flexibility of the spacesuits in order to better implement the space. Examine the experimental tasks.

The spacesuit is a very complex system, equivalent to a small spaceship. Currently, space suits fibrous product mainly used a nylon tricot fabric, PU coated nylon fabric, neoprene coated nylon fabric, polytetrafluoroethylene, fiber products such as Nomex® and Kevlar® cone. In order to protect the safety of astronauts walking outside the cabin, the fabric of the Apollo Moonsuit also has as many as 21 layers. The combination of soft and rigid parts provides support, movement and comfort.

Compared to the Apollo lunar spacesuit, NASA's new generation of NDX-1 spacesuits for Mars is made up of up to 350 materials including Kevlar® and carbon fiber , and is significantly lightweight. The control is around 4.8 mm and can be adapted to extreme environmental conditions.

Although the NDX-1 spacesuit has a certain degree of improvement in weight reduction and flexibility, it is essentially a combination of flexible structure and rigid structure. On this basis, the team of Professor Dava Newman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) A thinner Mars spacesuit BioSuitTM like "Second Skin" is proposed.

The most outstanding feature of the spacesuit system is the combination of memory alloy, passive elastic material and electrospinning material. The semi-rigid pressure strip is fixed on the flexible tight garment to replace the traditional aerospace garment. The cumbersome inflatable pressure limiting layer greatly reduces weight and increases flexibility. Among them, more than 1,000 feet of semi-rigid pressure strips are calculated and designed by pressure, and placed in a reasonable pattern at the critical strain point of the garment through 140,000 stitches to provide adequate and comfortable pressure for astronauts.

Another big advantage is that when the garment is damaged by wear or micro-meteor puncture, it can be repaired with a high-tech Ace tape, and the pressure of the ordinary spacesuit will disappear instantly after the inflation pressure limiting layer is destroyed, so that the astronauts are at In danger. In addition, by weaving gold fibers into clothing and working with biosensors, BioSuitTM can also collect astronauts' body data to help the ground command center monitor the astronauts' physical condition at all times. However, due to system complexity, BioSuitTM is still in the ground testing and improvement phase, and no further space testing and usage time has been announced.