NASA had to cancel its first all-female space walk earlier March 2, 2019, as they didn't have enough space suits that fit two women
NASA astronaut Anne McClain (File photo: NASA) The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration recently said it has selected two start-ups, Axiom and Collins Aerospace, to develop inclusive spacesuits for the International Space Station and Artemis lunar missions.
The contract enables the startups to provide space suits for NASA’s spacewalking needs during the period of performance through 2034, said NASA.
NASA had to cancel its first all-female space walk March 2, 2019, as they didn't have enough space suits that fit two women, according to media reports.
A few days before astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch were supposed to partake in the historic spacewalk, it was announced that McClain would have to be replaced by a male astronaut.
The first orders to be competed under the contract will include the development and services for the first demonstration outside the space station in the low-Earth orbit and for the Artemis III lunar landing.
“With these awards, NASA and our partners will develop advanced, reliable spacesuits that allow humans to explore the cosmos unlike ever before,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The contracts may be instrumental in realising Artemis a reality as spacesuits are the cornerstones that every space mission relies on. This is also extremely important for inclusivity of astronauts who are women or people of colour, read the press release
“Men are definitely not inherently better. We have evidence — it’s a small number because we only have a few females — but we have no statistical difference in the performance of astronauts between men and women. We just don’t have very many women because we don’t have many suits that fit them,” Dava Newman, the former NASA deputy administrator who is working on a new spacesuit design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had told The Verge.
NASA’s space suits have largely had the same design for almost 40 years and spacesuit design has long been biased toward men’s physiques, both due to technological constraints and the fact that NASA preferred male astronauts throughout most of its lifetime.
This leads to women often having to wear suits that are slightly larger than they should be despite the modular design that is used nowadays.
The extra room inside one’s spacesuit can make space walks more challenging and space is not a place where you want to add any more challenges to your plate than there already are, said experts.
“A spacesuit has to basically have all the functionality of a spacecraft with as little excess volume as possible, so the crew member can operate within the suit,” Daniel Burbank, a former astronaut and senior technical fellow at Collins Aerospace, had told The Verge.
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