Designing for the Stars

Dava Newman dons the skin-tight BioSuit Credit: Dava Newman/MIT

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007--

The days of astronauts wearing 300-pound marshmallow suits may soon be over. For the last seven years, Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has worked on designing a sleeker space suit. Her latest BioSuit model, released a few weeks ago, aims to improve astronaut mobility and flexibility.

Newman’s new suit is an obvious deviation from the bulky models that have been around since the earliest space missions forty years ago. The new suit is white with red piping, and is so tight that it’s described as “second skin.”

In traditional space suits, gas is pumped into the suit to simulate the atmospheric pressure of the Earth; that’s why they are so voluminous. Through a system called “mechanized counter pressure,” BioSuit creates pressure through tightness. The suit is so snug that (when working properly) it uniformly exerts 30 kiloPascals over the body. Newman’s model is based on a "Space Activity Suit" conceptualized by Dr. Paul Webb, M.D., in the late 1960s. Forty years ago Webb’s design couldn’t be implemented because no materials existed that could wrap tightly enough to create that much pressure, according to Newman.

Over the last seven years, however, Newman’s team—which currently includes MIT professor Jeff Hoffman and the design firm, Trotti and Associates—have designed fabrics that can do the job. Newman says they have created hybrid materials by combining “fancy” polymers with traditional fabrics, like nylon and spandex. “It’s taken a long time to show this is possible,” Newman says.

Creating sleeker space suits is not just about style: Newman's research shows that astronauts use eighty percent of their energy just to maneuver in today’s cumbersome suit—leaving little power for canvassing lunar craters and meandering through Martian mines. Newman aims to design a suit that will “swap these statistics,” providing space explorers more energy to do their job. “We need to empower astronauts,” declares Newman.

In the current prototype, nickel titanium wire laces draw the suit’s material together, like shoelaces pulled over a tongue. These wires are tightened with a ratcheting system, but, ultimately, Newman and her team hope to come up with a more sophisticated tightening method.

The next generation BioSuit may involve a material that sucks down around your skin “like shrink wrap,” says Newman. “It’s comfortable, like stockings. Then it cinches around you, [shrinking down] two to five centimeters.” The suit designers are also exploring a material that would be sensitive to either temperature or electric current, so when one or the other is applied, the tiny suit would expand, allowing the astronaut to shimmy into it. Ideally, each astronaut would have a suit tailored to his or her body shape.

Any new suit design will definitely use electroactive materials, such as the polymers that are responsive to electricity, says Bob Cassanova, director at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. These materials not only provide pressure, ideally they would be self-healing (if nicked by passing cosmic dust, for example) or able to perform tasks, like taking measurements of the environment. Newman says that artificial intelligence will also be a part of any design that NASA settles on. The aim is to create a suit that will be able to assess the environment for the astronaut—“giving, in real time, the right information to explore,” she says.

NASA should be casting about for contractors to begin building a new suit any day now, says Newman. The federal agency is pressed to get one finished in time for its planned space missions, the next of which is a return trip to the moon scheduled for 2018. “There’s a push for going back to the moon, and onto Mars, where [the astronauts] will be doing useful things, other than just existing,” Cassanova says. “They’d like to have a space suit that assists that process and allows astronauts … to really be very functional on these planetary surfaces.”

What did you think of the story? Send us some feedback.

--Molly Webster

Multimedia

Image: Space Suit

Sources

Dava Newman
Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA

Bob Cassanova
Director NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts Atlanta, Georgia

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