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Spacesuit Has Flex Appeal

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By KURT LOFT | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 22, 2007

TAMPA - Try working on your car dressed for a freezing day, wearing roller skates and oven mitts and standing upside down.

That's how astronauts describe doing anything in a bulky space suit, the wardrobe of choice in orbit. With its pressurized atmosphere, life support and heavy insulation, the typical space suit makes even the easiest job cumbersome, like trying to change a spark plug while wearing a straitjacket.

But next-generation astronauts could shed their armor and limited range of motion for a new style in cosmic fashion: the BioSuit.

A space suit of some sort is needed when a person travels above 60,000 feet — not to mention space — to supply oxygen and keep normal pressure around the body. Without maintaining this pressure, a person's body fluids would boil. Shuttle astronauts don full suits during ascent and re-entry in case the orbiter losses cabin pressure.

Traditional space suits worn by NASA astronauts are gas-pressurized outfits that provide protection against radiation and the temperature extremes of space. But they allow only about three feet of practical mobility, and astronauts must work with tools three times their normal size.

Dava Newman wants to make working in space easier. A professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Newman has designed a sleek, advanced suit for superior mobility.

The prototype spandex and nylon BioSuit, she says, would be a benefit to astronauts on long trips to the moon and possibly Mars. Traditional spacesuits, she says, "do not afford the mobility and locomotion that astronauts need for partial gravity exploration missions." A new suit is needed if people are to do long-term work and construction in space.

Newman and a team of engineers have been working on the suit concept for seven years. The goal is to make practical a lightweight, skintight suit that allows astronauts to move around more like humans than mannequins. Current suits protect astronauts, she says, but they limit what people would be able to do on long-term missions.

"It's a whole different ballgame when we go to the moon or Mars," Newman says. "We have to go back to walking and running."

Today's gas-pressurized space suits weigh up to 300 pounds and require a great deal of energy just to bend them. They require mechanical counter-pressure, which involves wrapping tight layers of material around the body, according to NASA. The BioSuit is skintight but stretches with the body, allowing more freedom of movement.

Newman believes another advantage of the BioSuit is safety. If a traditional spacesuit is punctured by a tiny meteorite or other object, the astronaut must return to the space station or home base before the suit decompresses. With the BioSuit, a small, isolated puncture can be wrapped much like a bandage, and the rest of the suit will be unaffected.

Reporter Kurt Loft can be reached at (813) 259-7570 or kloft@tampatrib.com.

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