freotech
Im the deputy program manager of VBA at action space in the suit here this morning is Jim Stein. Jim is an extraordinary engineer, whos a chief engineer on our team, so we gave him the honors we gave Jim the honors of demonstrating the suit this morning Im going to give him this uh walking staff here we are in Earth gravity were not on the moon. If anybody doesnt know on the moon, the gravity is about 1 6 of what it is here so just in case, Jim loses. His balance. Safety reasons want him to have that, but so Im going to talk through the suit design. Just very briefly, and as I do that Jim Smith performed some different actions, Mobility to demonstrate the mobility of the suit uh before you before we get into that, though, I want to talk about this cover layer, so the cover layer that you see the black, the Orange the blue. Personally, I think this looks amazing. I want to thank Esther Marquis for helping us design. This Esther is a designer, a spacesuit designer, on the show For All Mankind. If anyone has seen that on Apple TV plus, so this suit has a lot of that worked into this one of the differences between this suit and the suit that will be on the moon. Is that it will. The moon suit will mostly be white, so well replace all the black with white and thats really for thermal reasons, so didnt want anybody to to get that mixed up um, but other than that.
I think this is just a fantastic, fantastic looking suit. So let me let me go top to bottom here and just describe the suit overall. So well start with the light band. I think you guys saw the lights as Jim walked out on stage uh on the light bound is mounted to the visor assembly into the helmet bubble, and this this essentially gives the astronauts lights to see where theyre in shaded portions of the moon or, if theyre In low earth orbit in a night pass, they can turn on these lights to see using tools or translating on the space station or anything like that. We also have on the side. Here we have a HD video camera, so those of us back on spaceship earth watching the Eva will be able to watch it in high definition, which would be a fantastic upgrade. I think, from from current day technology. All of this is mounted on the helmet bubble, which is amounted to what we call in this configuration of our suit the hard upper torso. So the heart upper torso goes roughly from Jims waist up to the top, and this is kind of the core structure of the suit its. What we attach everything to um. So the arms lets talk about the backpack in a minute, so yeah. If Jim wants to demonstrate some of the arm ability here, this really just provides us again. Some structured amount things too. Each of the arms have a variety of Mobility joints and elements that weve designed at Axiom, including the gloves.
The gloves are a critical part of the suit design, especially for microgravity Evas, where youre using them for hours at a time to translate, to operate tools to you know, fix things to the suit and so on. So we put a ton of effort into those gloves. Pretty pretty proud of where theyre at and are confident those are going to perform very well. If Jim turns to the side here, some people may be wondering hey. How do you even get in this suit? Theres, a hatch on the back? Actually, you can see two hinges here, so this suits a little bit different than the suits of kind of today thats used in the space station. This is called a rear entry design or a back entry Design. This hatch would open up. You would put your feet in put your arms in and kind of, shimmy down into the suit, and then we would close the hatch um mounted to the hatch. Is this box affectionately known as the backpack? We call it the the portable life support system, so inside of this box are all the parts and the components to keep to kind of keep you alive while youre doing Eva, you can think of it as like. A very fancy. Scuba tank and air conditioner kind of combined into one so on the lower torso, so lets start kind of from the waist going down to the to the boots Ill. Let Jim do some squats and lunges and and just show off some of the uh.
Some of the mobility uh that the suit has and demonstrate some different movements, theres a variety of joints that weve put as well into the lower torso assembly, and this is going to be a huge improvement over the Apollo suits. The Apollo suits didnt. Have many of these types of joints that weve put in this suit, so the astronauts will be more comfortable, have an easier time walking performing tasks getting down to like to pick up a rock or something like that or use a geology tool um and then the Other thing that uh yeah thats a great great demonstration there by Jim um. The other thing I wanted to touch on is the boots. The boots are critical, uh critical part of the suit, especially for the the Artemis 3 mission and missions to the the South Pole of the Moon. Well be entering regions called permanently shadowed regions. These are regions of the Moon that never see sunlight and theyre very, very cold and so its very important that we insulate the boots uh appropriately to keep the astronauts feet comfortable during the Eva thats, a portion of the design theres theres, as Mr sufferini mentioned, theres. Many portions of this design that weve that weve kind of adopted from xcmu and are continuing to refine thats thats an excellent portion. The xcmu team did a tremendous job and a lot of our teammates did a tremendous job. Designing those boots so were taking those forward and refining them to flight.
