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When we think of spacesuits, we tend to conjure up
images of bulky suits like some sort of space-faring sponge diver with
huge rucksacks carrying hundreds of pounds of life support gear
consisting of air tanks, cooling water bottles, purifiers,
refrigeration units, pumps, regulators, and batteries to run it all.
And that is pretty much what spacesuits have been like since the days
of the Apollo programme. But in Where the Winds Sleep,
Neil P. Ruzic's book of predictions about future Lunar colonisation,
the general public got its first glimpse of a truly new idea in
spacesuits.
Nasa had long dreamed of making a spacesuit that
provided as much mobility as a pair of leotards and in the late '60s
they thought they'd hit upon the answer. Nasa scientists
realised that skin is actually a superb material for making
spacesuits. It is tough, elastic, holds in pressure rather well,
and does rather a good job of keeping a person warm or cool as needed.
So, they reasoned, why not make a suit that mimics what skin does.
The result was the first prototypes of the Space Activity Suit (SAS).
Instead of being a heavy garment of multiple layers
of rubberised cloth intended to keep air around an astronaut like a
bag, the SAS was a simple skin-tight leotard that clung to the
astronaut like so much spandex and protected him from the vacuum of
space by applying counter-pressure. On his head, the astronaut
wore a simple helmet with an airtight seal around the neck to keep air
from leaking into the suit and he had an inflatable bladder installed
across his chest to keep his lungs from inflating like balloons and
suffocating the him.
The other clever bit was that the suit was porous
so that sweat could be wicked away and evaporated, allowing the
astronaut to cool naturally without the need for a liquid-cooIed
garment, so the life support system became essentially a tank of
oxygen equipped with pressure regulators. With an outer layer of
silvered material to keep off the Sun's heat and micrometeorites,
liquid oxygen for maximum air supply, and a good sized canteen to
replace lost sweat, an astronaut could go for twenty four hours easy.
Barring toilet breaks, of course.
 In
Ruzic's view of the future, Lunar colonists hiked about the Moon's
surface from the mid-seventies onward in spacesuits that hadn't looked
so trim since the original Star Trek series, but in the real world the
skin-tight spacesuit went about as far as Ruzic's dream of a Lunar
colony being founded by 1975.
That is, until recently when new advances in
materials and spacesuit design principles revived the SAS in it's new
incarnation as the MIT
Biosuit.
I'd be very excited by all of this, but I still
maintain that a spandex spacesuit is probably most unflattering to
astronauts who have reached a certain age. |
