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00:00Would like to...
00:30Struggling into the latest shuttle suit isn't easy.
00:38Made from thick layers of advanced materials and fixed with hard joints,
00:43it is more like a miniature spacecraft than clothing.
00:49Susan Shentrup is a spacesuit technician.
00:52Her average size, fitness and technical skills make her an ideal guinea pig
00:56when a reconditioned suit needs a test.
01:00All right, underneath the lower torso, you see she's got a cooling garment on.
01:04She's got to put on thumb loops.
01:05The tight-fitting cooling garment is a British invention from the 50s,
01:09originally for fighter pilots.
01:11That makes sure their garment doesn't get bunched up on her shoulders.
01:16And she absolutely just dives through, puts her arms up and pushes with her legs
01:21straight up into the hut with a hard upper torso.
01:26All right, she's up inside.
01:28First thing we're going to do is get her a little cooling, so she hooks up the garment to the backpack.
01:33Locks in place.
01:34This belt-like clip is a hose connector that joins the pipes laced through the cooling garment
01:38to a cold water supply on her backpack.
01:41She's going to use these donning handles.
01:43She brings it up and lines it up.
01:45All right, drive it up into the locks.
01:52And then we're all set.
01:54Okay, next we don the communication cap.
01:58Adjust the chin strap under the chin.
02:01Make sure the microphones are up close against my mouth.
02:03All right, next step is put on the gloves.
02:13The gloves need to stop a bullet and pick up a dime, say the astronauts.
02:18But NASA has never cracked the problem of gloves.
02:21They remain bulky, uncomfortable, and inhibit dexterity.
02:25She can't inadvertently come off in space, so there's a lock and a secondary lock behind that.
02:33It takes two hands to get them open.
02:35The hand and space, so the gloves are the trickiest part of the suit.
02:38So she's got the ability to tighten up the gloves to fit her hands.
02:43That's what she's doing there.
02:44And we'll turn on the, uh, put on the helmet, get her buttoned up.
02:50All right, the helmet locks in place just like the other garments.
02:58She lines that up, drives it down, and she can lock it in place.
03:02And she's ready to get ready to go outside.
03:05So we're going to take her off the wall.
03:08The shuttle suit weighs over 250 pounds.
03:11This cumbersome suit is all that NASA can offer its astronaut in space.
03:17The helmet visors.
03:22It is a triumph.
03:24Not of science, but of engineering.
03:27A culmination of a 50-year struggle to live outside the protection of Earth's atmosphere.
03:34A mere 30 years from now,
03:37the U.S. administration expects Americans to step onto the surface of Mars.
03:41For that, this suit is useless.
03:44So where does NASA go from here?
03:47And how did it get here in the first place?
03:49The year is 1959,
04:09and America's first seven astronauts line up for the group photograph.
04:12Afterwards, John Glenn, perhaps the embodiment of the crew-cut all-American space hero,
04:20climbs aboard an Air Force fighter.
04:23Glenn and his fellow Mercury astronauts are pilots.
04:26For their first journeys into space,
04:29they will wear little more than a Navy pilot's pressure suit.
04:31As far as the Navy suit is concerned,
04:35very little was done to make it applicable for the Mercury configuration.
04:40We changed some of the materials.
04:42We used lighter weight materials.
04:44We used an aluminized version of that material to jazz it up, if you will.
04:49So there were no real requirements for having, as far as I remember,
04:57an aluminized outer garment.
05:00But it looked good.
05:02It did make it different from the Navy version.
05:05And the entire suit was lighter.
05:07The suit would expand, pressurize you,
05:09keep you in a safe atmosphere until you got down to a lower altitude,
05:12where the suit would deflate again,
05:14and there you were just like flying in a flight suit.
05:16It was a suit simply to provide backup protection
05:20in the event the cabin lost pressure.
05:24America's first space pilot, Alan Shepard,
05:27knows that this is all he can expect from his silver-coated suit.
05:31It might get him home if his tiny Mercury capsule loses pressure,
05:35but it is doubtful.
05:42Prior to flight, all suits were tested for leaks.
05:44At five pounds per square inch of pressure,
05:48the suit goes stiff, like a pumped-up car tire,
05:52but in the shape of a man.
05:54It formed the shape of a man in a seated position
05:57with his hands in a relatively neutral position, such as this,
06:03and his legs pretty much in a seated position.
06:08But the Mercury pilots will never use these so-called get-me-down spacesuits,
06:17pressurized.
06:18Every flight succeeds,
06:20so the silver suits are worn deflated and soft,
06:23just as they were in fighter jets.
06:24On Earth, we live unaware of our own natural fleshy spacesuits.
06:37Muscular power pressurizes us, keeping everything in place,
06:41pressurizing the blood, squeezing the internal organs,
06:44and inflating our lungs.
06:46All around us is pressurized gas.
06:50We call it air, but it is heavy,
06:54at sea level weighing over 14 pounds per square inch.
06:58This weight forces air into us, helping us breathe,
07:01so we don't have to gasp to get oxygen from the air.
07:06Two things happen as we climb above sea level.
07:09We breathe more heavily as the air gets thinner,
07:12and our bodies expand as internal pressure overpowers the lighter atmosphere.
07:18Once in space, there is no air,
07:21and our pressurized bodies,
07:23released from counteractive atmospheric pressure,
07:25would simply explode
07:26as our blood boiled.
07:30So, at a minimum,
07:38a spacesuit must provide breathable oxygen,
07:40and sufficient pressure to stop our bodies inflating.
07:50It was the high-flying American,
07:52Wiley Post,
07:53who in 1934 first wore a pressure suit
07:56for altitude record attempts.
07:58He discovered that when his soft rubber suit
08:02was pressurized,
08:03it became hard and immobile.
08:13Before Wiley Post can try the suit,
08:15he is killed in a plane crash.
08:18You could look at a spacesuit
08:20as encapsulating the body in a balloon,
08:24and the pressure comes from the inflation
08:27of the spacesuit to provide
08:29an adequate pressure around the body
08:32that's required for survival,
08:35in particular in a vacuum of space.
08:38The problem comes in
08:40in trying to shape that balloon
08:42to the anthropomorphic dimensions of the body
08:45such that where you have joints
08:47at your shoulder and your elbows
08:49and knees and waist,
08:51you can achieve mobility of the joints
08:53such that you can do productive tasks
08:55through body movement.
08:58So the pressurization that's required
09:00to pressurize the suit acts as a force
09:02that the astronaut must overcome
09:04in moving the joints of the suit.
09:11Once America's two-man Gemini program
09:13is underway,
09:14the requirements of the spacesuit
09:15change dramatically.
09:18The astronauts will no longer sit passively
09:20at the controls.
09:20They will open the hatch
09:22and tumble into space.
09:26Known as extravehicular activity,
09:28or EVA,
09:29it becomes clear
09:30that the immobilizing pressure
09:32will be the main obstacle
09:33to useful work in space.
09:36This is astronaut Ed White.
09:39He can barely move.
09:42A stiff wave is about the limit of his action.
09:44To investigate the problem,
09:53a complete EVA simulation
09:54had been developed
09:55in huge underwater tanks.
09:59They mimicked with uncanny accuracy
10:02the stiff immobility
10:03of the Gemini suits in space.
10:07Soon answers are found.
10:10Called constant volume joints,
10:12they transform the performance
10:13of the astronauts
10:14with bellows-like hinges
10:15at critical points.
10:18Picture an accordion,
10:19you play music,
10:21you open it like a fan
10:22and the bottom squeezes
10:23and the top expands,
10:25such as you're keeping
10:26the constant volume.
10:28The pressure that's expended
10:29squeezing the bottom
10:30is alleviated
10:32by spreading the additional volume
10:34at the top.
10:35So the constant volume joint
10:36was the answer
10:39to good mobility in the suit.
10:40But the exuberant publicity stunt
10:44of football on Earth
10:45in a suit
10:46with constant volume joints
10:47at four pounds per square inch
10:49hardly compares
10:50with the exhausting rigidity
10:52the astronaut has to overcome
10:53when this pressure expands
10:55against the vacuum
10:56on the surface of the moon.
10:57The age of Apollo
11:07was the high point
11:08of suit research.
11:10With money,
11:11no object,
11:12outrageous
11:12and practical answers
11:13were offered.
11:15Mars was to be colonized
11:17in the mid-80s.
11:19America was in the frontier business again.
11:21in the mid-80s.
11:51Back on Earth, the business of spacesuit construction
12:13was somewhat less romantic.
12:15With a vast American military-industrial complex to draw on,
12:19it seems odd that a sleepy town in Delaware
12:21should become home to the uniform of the American space hero.
12:28Just outside the town of Dover is ILC,
12:31once known as International Latex Corporation,
12:34and before that, part of Playtex, the living bra people.
12:40Sole contractors for all U.S. spacesuits since Apollo,
12:43ILC used the corsetry skills of ladies seamstresses
12:46to ensure absolute integrity.
12:49Cut and sewn to a tolerance of one-sixteenth of an inch,
12:58one needle hole in the wrong place
12:59means back to the start on any one of the 11 layers of the shuttle suit.
13:05The innermost layer is a LCVG garment,
13:09liquid cooling and ventilation garment.
13:10It's made of two basic materials.
13:13The innermost layer of that garment is a nylon material.
13:18It helps wick the moisture away from the body and keep the crewman comfortable.
13:21The next layer is a spandex material and this is so that it fits very well and conformal to his body and there's some EVA tubing that's strung through that.
13:32The function of the tubing is to carry water through the space suit to cool the astronaut.
13:38The next layer is the bladder material.
13:41It's a nylon material. It's a nylon material with a polyurethane coating.
13:46The next layer is the structural layer of the suit.
13:49The outer layer is the polyester or dacron layer and it's the major structural layer.
13:53The outer most layer is a composite of a number of materials and it's called the TMG.
13:59This layer is a neoprene coated nylon material and it's the micrometeorite layer and its function is to stop the micrometeorite impacts.
14:08The next five layers are the thermal layers and this is an aluminized mylar material.
14:16It has a nylon scrim on the backside and the scrim acts as a standoff to create a vacuum in between the layers to protect from thermal.
14:28The outermost layer is called an ortho fabric. It's made of Kevlar, Nomex, and Teflon.
14:36It's a very flexible material and it's the outside protective layer of the, of the suit.
14:48The NASA space suit has evolved layers of material through stages of development to the thick and heavy space vehicle it is today.
14:56But it remains a distant cousin of the original Mercury suit.
15:02The big problem in Mercury was comfort,
15:04uh, unpressurized, uh, today in shuttle the, the problem is making sure we don't have any kind of problems that could, uh, cause a, a, an abort of the mission that you weren't trying to achieve or loss of life of an astronaut.
15:19Cause it is, when you're in a spacewalk, you're, you're right out there and there's very little thickness of material in the bladder and restraint between you and, and the vacuum.
15:27Apart from sheer material strength, there are more complex reasons for the bulk of today's shuttle suit.
15:36Inside the shuttle's cargo bay, temperatures can reach 121 degrees centigrade.
15:42And yet on its dark side, can drop to minus 157 degrees.
15:46In addition to this, the working astronaut is creating heat too.
15:52The human body acts like a flame.
15:54It produces heat.
15:55At least 100 watts, uh, cooling to 100 watt bulb when you're just practically asleep.
16:00Could be 10, 15 times that much when you're doing exercise.
16:03So that heat is being pumped into the space suit.
16:05Space suit's like a thermos bottle.
16:07It's heating up.
16:07If we didn't remove the heat that built up inside that thermos bottle, you'd cook them.
16:12So cooking is what they did.
16:16Astronauts worked for hours inside suits under heat lamps to make sure death through exhaustion couldn't happen.
16:23Even today, the simple British underwear with its piped cooling water still works perfectly under all conditions.
16:30The heat was picked up that was generated on the skin by these pipes, precluding, therefore, perspiration.
16:37So that for a finite period of time, and it ran anywhere from four to six and maybe emergency seven hours, where you can work hard and not perspire.
16:50And for certain periods of time, you could work at a rate of 2,000 BTU per hour, which is extremely high.
16:55Equivalent to the soaring down of a tree in the tropics.
16:59And you would not perspire.
17:00This has got to be one of the most proud moments of my life, I guarantee you.
17:04The moon was the real test.
17:08The bulky backpack, or portable life support system, known as a PLIS, carried cooling water, batteries, oxygen, and all the electronics for a seven-hour EVA.
17:17Let me put some weight here.
17:19The PLIS was a miracle of mid-60s technology, and coupled to the suit remains a target for weight and reliability today.
17:33The lightest suit we've ever built, which was the Apollo suit, in recent times, that is, weighed 220 pounds.
17:43And on the moon, with one-sex gravity, that ended up being a nice 37 pounds equivalent weight that you carry on your back.
17:51If you were to take that suit and put it on Mars, it would weigh 80 somewhat pounds.
17:56It would just be way too heavy to walk around in.
18:00Now, that was the Apollo suit.
18:01Now, since then, we've evolved through all the bells and whistles and everything else that we've wanted to put on to a suit that's approaching 300 pounds.
18:08And projected space station suits are, you hear, anywhere from 350 up to, God knows, 500 pounds.
18:13So, clearly, in terms of the weights, they're completely unacceptable.
18:33Outside the shuttle, leg movement is unnecessary.
18:37Work is done with the arms.
18:39The legs float free.
18:40So, these already heavy suits do not have some of the joints that would be needed for walking and bending.
18:50The shuttle suit was designed for Earth orbit application where there's no requirement to walk
18:55on any surface, under any gravity field.
18:59And as a result, we did not incorporate unique joints in the lower torso or the pant section of the shuttle suit
19:06because that is expensive and it adds weight and complexity that's not necessary.
19:11So, there was a conscious decision not to incorporate the best mobility features
19:17that were present in the Apollo suit in the shuttle suit because it wasn't necessary.
19:22that остан ions that were hinten agree with aim to give me an idea of 5.
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19:40it was free to pretend that the plane was very bad.
19:43It was very beautiful.
19:43It was like, my company should do not retire.
19:44But it was never seen as a result,
19:45the scale of mine is you know.
19:46Or a lamp that is not Bu konai-le wanting,
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19:49All current work in space is so-called upper torso effort.
20:02This upper torso effort is in marked contrast to the activity on the surface of a planet,
20:08where walking, or on the surface of the moon, so-called bunny hopping,
20:12had again been predicted with uncanny accuracy by NASA on Earth.
20:15Because of these original requirements,
20:21most of the data about human exertion in space comes from early models.
20:27What is the human machine?
20:30Its circulation, digestion,
20:35sight, hearing, balance,
20:42its endurance.
20:43Running, bending, climbing, and breathing profiles were developed.
20:48Today, revealing upper torso investigations are underway at Ames Research in California.
20:53What we're trying to do is simulate the muscular activity and the metabolic rate of an astronaut
21:01in extravehicular activity, what we call EVA.
21:05And so what I'm looking at is not only their oxygen consumption,
21:08how much oxygen their body is using,
21:10but also how much carbon dioxide their body is producing,
21:12and a number of different skin temperatures, core temperature,
21:15and, of course, heart rate, just to keep them safe.
21:17He's not only having to work against the seat,
21:23which is going up and down, which would happen in an astronaut in EVA.
21:26He might be working up and down with his knees bending,
21:29but he's also having to work on the seat,
21:32and that the seat is going from side to side.
21:34His feet are in restraints,
21:36and that's helping him to remain stable.
21:38That with the help of the legs and the muscles in the legs.
21:42One of the exercises we're also doing is keeping this seat in a locked position
21:45so that it does not move at all like you're seeing it now.
21:48So one day he may come in and do this exact test with it completely stationary,
21:52another day with it moving.
21:53Our premise is that on the day when he is in an unlocked or moving position as he is now,
21:56he's going to expend more energy
21:58because it's that much harder to do the work with the lower body,
22:01what we call the isometric work.
22:04This upper torso investigation is critical
22:06because in 1996,
22:09NASA's next step into space will not be to the planets,
22:12but to the weightless working environment of the space station.
22:15The space station will be built from prefabricated sections,
22:40assembled by space-suited engineers
22:42with their feet locked to the components in stirrups.
22:45They will probably wear a version of this advanced or Mark III suit.
22:51With its turtle-like pliss,
22:53it is an even heavier version of the shuttle suit.
22:59One of the features of the Mark III suit
23:02is that we had kind of taken a step away
23:06from the type of donning system that we had in the shuttle suit
23:09and went to a rear entry configuration.
23:11And basically, this hatch would have the portable life support system attached to it
23:18and the crew member would basically come up, float,
23:22put his legs down in here, and don the suit.
23:25Prior to getting into the suit, however,
23:27when he's halfway in, he would connect up his liquid coolant garment.
23:30This would be part of the pliss.
23:32In fact, we have a hinge mechanism here
23:35where we can pull these two pin elements
23:39and this whole hatch would come off.
23:42And ostensibly, with the pliss connected to that,
23:44you can actually replace a pliss on orbit or on the lunar surface or on Mars
23:48if you utilize this same concept.
23:50Well, although, you know, we were designing this primarily
23:54to satisfy space station baseline requirements,
23:58with the incorporation of the hip earrings
24:01and the rolling convolute waist joint that we have in here,
24:04the suit actually turned out to be a very good walking suit.
24:07In fact, we're looking at some of these technology features
24:10for application towards the lunar Mars program when that comes about.
24:14But we'll be using features such as this from the suit for the next upgrade.
24:18We'll probably be taking other elements of the suit.
24:21For example, as we see here, it's a large torso.
24:25It's currently composed of cast aluminum,
24:29and we're now looking at replacing all these hard elements
24:31of this particular suit with a lightweight composite material.
24:37With the suits becoming more like small spacecraft,
24:40life in the actual spacecraft has become slightly less uncomfortable.
24:48Instead of the suits being worn constantly,
24:52work on board the shuttle is as near normal as weightlessness allows.
24:57Pressurized to Earth atmosphere, breathing normally and wearing shorts,
25:02the crew offer a tantalizing glimpse of a very different type of life in space.
25:07It wasn't always like this.
25:10In the cramped two-man Gemini capsule,
25:13simple problems dogged the design of suits and the comfort of the crew.
25:16On the long space-suited journeys,
25:23personal hygiene was a real challenge
25:25until Matt Radonofsky and Jim Corialli
25:27came up with the defecation mitten.
25:31Matt had the idea for a defecation mitten, as we called it.
25:35It was designed with one finger in a bag
25:39and had an antroputrification medicine within it,
25:47myodyne and some other mixtures, I presume.
25:49I don't recall. It's been so long ago.
25:51But, of course, you unzip the suit
25:55and you place this against the buttock.
25:58And being in weightlessness, of course,
26:01the stool had to be batted down
26:04with that one finger that was in the bags.
26:08And then, of course, you wiped and stuffed the wipe
26:10inside the bag
26:12and closed the bag up and kneaded it
26:15to prevent it from gasifying and exploding.
26:18And the funny part about it,
26:20as the astronauts ate food
26:22and reduced the contents of a food compartment,
26:25these so-called livet bags were placed therein.
26:28And it all worked out fairly well.
26:32So did the special problems women in space
26:34brought to suit design.
26:36A nappy.
26:38We did come up with the idea of this diaper
26:40and it really, I think, is sensational.
26:46The material we use and the products,
26:49I won't get into,
26:50but it had the capability of absorbing
26:54200 times its own weight.
26:56And we got to develop, made a diaper.
27:00In fact, I had my secretary wear it one night at home
27:03and it worked absolutely perfect
27:05and it left no irritation, anything whatsoever.
27:08And I believe they still use it today.
27:15Deep inside the NASA Ames Research Center
27:17in California is a forgotten storeroom.
27:23For spacesuit designer Vic Vickical,
27:25it contains remnants of his life's work.
27:30In here are the suits that didn't make it into orbit.
27:36They are the hard suits.
27:39Hard, because unlike the hand-stitched
27:42so-called soft suits worn in Mercury,
27:44Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle,
27:46they do not inflate.
27:49Hard suits are built from lobster-like sections
27:51that rotate on bearings.
27:53This overcomes one of the main problems
27:56with the soft space suits.
27:58The effort, or torque,
28:00required to move the joints
28:01and hold them in position once there
28:03is minimal.
28:03We have done detailed measurements
28:07of like the torques,
28:08the torques being how much force does it take
28:10to move the joint elements.
28:13And they're significantly lower
28:14than the technologies in the soft suit world.
28:18For example, if you bend this elbow joint,
28:22there's no energy required to hold that arm
28:24in this position.
28:25Typically with a soft suit,
28:26it wants to rebound or restore back
28:29to some position that is,
28:31it only has one neutral point.
28:33That's the advantage of hard suit technology
28:35and the fact that the amount of energy
28:36that it takes for the astronaut
28:38just to move the suit
28:39is significantly lower
28:40than the current technology in soft suits.
28:43Hard suits are not new.
28:50In fact, work on hard suits
28:52started at the dawn of the space program
28:54and while ungainly on Earth,
28:57promised improved mobility
28:58in the weightless vacuum of space.
29:04But as this early research film shows,
29:07getting all the joints into the right place
29:09can be a problem.
29:10The limb movement needed to align the joints
29:23became known as programming.
29:26Programming means that
29:27if I want to flex a joint,
29:30if I want to reach here to do something,
29:33if I want to reach there to do something,
29:34I would like my nude body reach
29:38to be followed and translated in the suit.
29:42I want to be able to reach from here to here
29:44without some intermediate motion
29:46where I align the joint
29:47to be able to get to that point.
29:49And programming is an aspect
29:51that runs into,
29:52that is more likely to happen
29:56within a hard joint.
29:57Now there are good hard joints designs
29:59that minimize that,
30:01but that programming aspect
30:03is a problem that we've seen
30:06in hard joint construction.
30:08There is programming,
30:09but let me say this,
30:10that programming is something
30:11that you get used to very fast
30:14in the fact that it's a matter
30:15of exposure to the suit.
30:18When we test suits,
30:19you've got to realize
30:19that the astronauts
30:20have been hundreds and hundreds
30:21and hundreds of hours
30:22in the particular suit that they use.
30:24Therefore, if something else comes along,
30:26they can be very critical of it
30:28because they haven't had enough time in it.
30:29If they had had all that amount of time
30:31in a hard suit
30:31and then went into that suit
30:33that they have currently,
30:34their response would probably be the same.
30:35It's transitioning.
30:38It's like they say,
30:39if you've got something that works
30:41and it's not broken,
30:42don't change it.
30:46The shuttle suit hasn't broken,
30:48but it is changing.
30:50It already has a hard upper torso
30:52or hut
30:53that the crew can wriggle into.
30:56But perversely,
30:57most of the joints remain soft
30:59and inflatable
30:59and therefore get stiffer
31:01the more pressure
31:02is put into them.
31:09The atmosphere on board
31:10the space shuttle
31:11is similar to earth pressure,
31:13about 14 pounds per square inch.
31:16So to get into a suit
31:17at 4 pounds per square inch,
31:19a period of decompression
31:20is necessary.
31:21This takes 24 hours
31:27as they drop the pressure
31:28inside the shuttle
31:29to 10 pounds,
31:31about the same pressure
31:32as high places on earth
31:33like Mexico City
31:34or Denver, Colorado.
31:41Inside the airlock,
31:43they bridge the difference
31:44to match the lower 4 pounds
31:46per square inch pressure
31:47of the suit
31:47before opening the hatch
31:49and floating
31:50into the shuttle bay.
31:53It is rather like
31:55decompressing a diver
31:56after a deep dive.
31:58Nitrogen narcosis
31:59or even the bends
32:00is the risk.
32:02When you start out
32:03from a space shuttle,
32:04which is at one atmosphere,
32:05normal breathing,
32:06oxygen, nitrogen
32:06at one atmosphere pressure,
32:08you are saturated
32:09with nitrogen
32:10at that pressure.
32:11If you want to go to
32:12and operate
32:13in a space suit,
32:14which is at a lower pressure
32:15outside of the vehicle,
32:16you have exactly
32:17the same problem.
32:18You have to get rid
32:19of the nitrogen.
32:20That takes time
32:21to do it safely.
32:23The choice of suit pressure
32:25then very much
32:26comes into that.
32:27If you have a suit pressure
32:28which is exactly
32:30the same as your
32:30habitat pressure
32:31or your shuttle pressure
32:32in this case,
32:33then you have no problem.
32:34The lower you make
32:35the pressure in the suit,
32:36the more problem you have
32:38with getting rid
32:38of that nitrogen
32:39exactly as a diver
32:40has to do.
32:46So ideally,
32:55a shuttle EVA suit
32:57should operate
32:57at at least
32:5810 pounds of pressure.
33:04Yet if the suits used
33:06today were inflated
33:06to that pressure,
33:07they would become
33:08too stiff to work in.
33:09It is at high pressures
33:14that hard suit technology
33:15now begins
33:16to look more attractive.
33:18With these types
33:19of suits,
33:21it's rather,
33:22and I put in quotes,
33:23insensitive to the pressure
33:24and the fact
33:24that the performance
33:25at four are at 10
33:27pounds per square inch
33:28is negligible
33:31in terms of the astronaut
33:32being able to tell
33:32that there's a difference.
33:33Rotating at the shoulder.
33:34It's on Earth
33:38that astronauts
33:38can really tell
33:39the difference.
33:41Suits are worn
33:41mostly for training
33:42and testing.
33:44They spend relatively
33:44small amounts
33:45of time in space
33:46and this has always
33:47given soft suits
33:48an advantage.
33:51I think 90%
33:52of the use in a suit
33:55was in training
33:56at 1G.
33:59And a hard suit
34:00is a lot,
34:01I think,
34:01much more uncomfortable.
34:03In fact,
34:04the first hard suits
34:05that I came across
34:06and I tried one
34:07and had a bicycle seat
34:09that you had to sit on.
34:12And I don't know,
34:13I just ride my own bicycle
34:14around the street
34:15and that's a little
34:15uncomfortable after a while
34:16sitting on a bicycle seat.
34:34Oh,
34:35boy.
34:35Oh,
34:37nigga,
34:37he don't know.
34:50Oh,
34:52yeah.
34:54All right, Jerry.
35:21Yeah, do you want to hold that door, Bernie?
35:22Yeah, I've got it.
35:23Okay, on?
35:24Don't want it to pull on your LCG.
35:25There is now a hard suit that is taken seriously
35:28as a contender for prolonged zero-gravity use.
35:31It is called the AX-5.
35:33I know the LCG pulled it shut, so...
35:35Okay, you've still got straps, but I can't.
35:37I'll grab it.
35:39Okay, ready to shut that hand?
35:41Yeah, almost done.
35:41Like the advanced Mark III, it has a hatch for rear entry.
35:47Locked.
35:48Water in and locked.
35:49Instead of concertina fabric or convoluted joints,
35:52it uses the cleverly angled, pressure-tight bearings
35:56developed over the years by Vic Vickical and his team here at Ames.
36:00Okay, railing coming out.
36:09Here we go.
36:10But the AX-5 still suffers from the same difficulty all hard suits have.
36:23It is heavy and clumsy on earth.
36:25Okay, I can see them now.
36:26Keep going.
36:27Okay.
36:31For the designers, this is a small price to pay for one major advantage over soft suits.
36:38It can be produced in large batches on modern computer-controlled machine tools.
36:42The thing about a hard suit is the fact that you can use standard aerospace techniques for fabrication,
36:51for inspection, for materials controls.
36:55It's not an art.
36:56It's a science.
36:57One of the things that drove us to consider more and more hard elements
37:00was the reproducibility of the materials
37:02and the reproducibility of the fabrication process
37:05where things are made on machines,
37:07they're made to drawings,
37:08much as things in your car or an aircraft are done.
37:10So every part is very, very similar to every other part.
37:14The margin of error on fabrication and design is lower,
37:19and that tends to mean that the costs will go down.
37:21It doesn't mean that you can't build a perfectly safe and functional part with hand goods,
37:25but you tend to have a higher reject rate.
37:29It doesn't take any black arts, any magic arts,
37:33any particular artistic capabilities of manufacturing it.
37:38You don't have to be a good seamstress.
37:40You have to be an engineer.
37:41You have to be a good metals man to do it.
37:47Just to give you an idea of the work envelope.
37:50And a metal man is the result.
37:52But in the weightless buoyancy of a water tank,
37:54an amazingly mobile one.
37:56I get down just about, touch my toes.
38:00The remarkable thing about this suit is that it's a constant volume suit,
38:03which means that in any position I get into,
38:08it doesn't take any effort to hold the suit there.
38:11And again, I'm showing you the work envelope here
38:16while you have both feet and foot restrained.
38:19And there are certain positions where you may have to just work around
38:27a little, you know, what's called programming of the joint.
38:31But it's very slight, and it's really just a learning curve.
38:34It's just, you might not be able to go from point A to point B directly,
38:37but you figure out very quickly how to do that.
38:39What I can do is I can show you the mobility of the legs
38:45by just bending backwards.
38:49And you can see that you can go all the way back here.
38:52The limiting factor here is the bottom of the tank.
38:54The hard AX-5 is an Ames research project,
38:57whereas the soft suits favored by NASA
38:59were developed in the vast facilities
39:01at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.
39:04Until recently, there was a battle for supremacy
39:07between the two approaches.
39:09But it is likely that the best features of those hard suits
39:11and these soft suits will lead eventually
39:14to a new, much lighter hybrid outfit.
39:16We are moving in a direction of combining
39:20the best features of the soft suit and the hard suit.
39:25Unfortunately, the soft suit, hard suit issue
39:28has become somewhat of a debate,
39:32and it has somewhat polarized the community.
39:36But the reality is that we are already using a hybrid suit,
39:41and I think the pragmatists will have the day,
39:44and we will use the best elements of both.
39:48Certain features of the AX-5 suit that was produced by Ames
39:51is superior to any other suit we have.
39:53And we are looking to see how those features
39:58could be incorporated right now into the shuttle EMU.
40:02We have no pride of ownership in terms of
40:05this is ours and this is theirs.
40:07We have pride of ownership, and we have a good product.
40:09We put an astronaut in it, we fly.
40:12And we want to get the best.
40:14For the crewman, that we can afford.
40:17That meets the requirements.
40:19And if it's a piece of the AX-5, or a piece of the Mark III,
40:22or it's a piece of a Project Mercury suit,
40:25we would use it if it was the best.
40:27If we could convince the system that that's the best,
40:29and the program should use it.
40:30Neither hard nor soft technology has really solved the glove problem.
40:42Unlike the suits, shuttle gloves are custom-built for each astronaut,
40:46and yet they reduce the potential of the human hand in space
40:49to the point where some have questioned the validity of EVAs at all.
40:53If you can't use these in space, there's very little reason for you to be there.
40:59Certainly no reason for you to be outside the vehicle.
41:01The hand is a very complicated system here.
41:04We've got about 35 different mobility functions, all of them combined.
41:09Finger motion, tactility, wrist motion.
41:12So the idea is to try to miniaturize, if possible,
41:15some of those joint elements that we would have in the suit
41:17into the structure of a glove.
41:19But it's a difficult task.
41:22When we started in the program back in the Mercury-Gemini period,
41:26this happens to be an old Gemini configuration glove
41:28that had very little mobility.
41:31But this glove, for its simple mobility,
41:33utilized fabric restraint with some knuckle break points here, as you can see.
41:38And then the wrist area was very simple,
41:39just a strap that would cinch down and allow you to flex and bend
41:44in a reduced diameter fabric element.
41:48Apollo gloves were not much more involved from a technology standpoint
41:53due to the fact that, again, we were looking at spinoffs
41:58from some of the technology of the high-altitude aircraft era.
42:03The gloves for Apollo were custom-designed to the individual's hand size,
42:07so it did help perform some mobility features.
42:10And also, again, being a soft material,
42:12gave good tactility as well as the dexterity of the material.
42:18The more advanced glove systems, as we got involved in higher operating pressure,
42:23relied more and more on hard structures.
42:25This was an early hard suit glove.
42:27You can see we had a rolling convoluted wrist,
42:30a lot of hard ring blade elements, hard linkages,
42:34and a hard palmer structure.
42:35And we had, at that time, an internal type metacarpal joint.
42:41Joe Cosmo's Black Museum of Gloves
42:43is evidence of the frustrating difficulty of glove design for work in space.
42:47At the moment, NASA's gloves offer little more dexterity than thick mittens,
43:03but they are thick for good reason.
43:06To do things, you've got to touch and feel and brush against other objects,
43:10which could be rough surfaces or have potentially sharp objects,
43:15so the material has to be tough and durable at the same time.
43:18But I wouldn't by any means say that it's a fully dexterous,
43:24highly mobile, adequate glove for long-term operations in space.
43:32Research into long-term glove use is done in vacuum chambers like this.
43:37These latest gloves do not have their thick outer micrometeoroid protective cover
43:42and yet are already at the lower limits of useful dexterity
43:45at only five pounds of pressure.
43:51Hard joints make movement easier,
43:54but the more metal a glove has, the bulkier it gets.
43:58The bulkier it gets, the less used the hand becomes.
44:01This rare fragment of film from the 60s
44:06shows a completely different approach to pressurized glove design.
44:10It uses the tight fit of elasticated material
44:13to exert mechanical counterpressure directly onto the flesh of the hand.
44:17We looked at the mechanical counterpressure glove
44:21as opposed to a full-pressure glove,
44:23and basically there's a physiological problem that crops up.
44:27Because you take the basic suit,
44:29we were looking at taking a full-pressure suit
44:30and then maybe stopping it at the wrist area
44:32and then continuing it with a mechanical counterpressure glove.
44:37But then you have this pressure differential between the suit pressure
44:40and what the elastic material,
44:42which you use basically in this restraint in a glove,
44:45and you find that the difference in this pressure
44:48causes a couple of problems.
44:49One is the fact that the hand's starting to swell.
44:51You get pooling because of the differential.
44:53You have lower pressure in the glove area
44:55than you have in the rest of the suit.
44:57And that's only tolerable for a very short period of time.
45:02Made to protect the wearer from the vacuum of space,
45:05the space activity suit consists of layers of elastic cloth.
45:09This is film of a suit that has long since rotted away.
45:12The elastic cloth exerts mechanical force
45:15on the skin to counteract the effects
45:17of breathing oxygen under positive pressure.
45:21The space activity suit allows an unlimited range of body motions.
45:28The subject walks, crawls, and climbs...
45:31This is not underwear.
45:32This is the complete suit.
45:35Instead of air pressure,
45:37the suit uses the body-hugging properties of elastic
45:39to counteract the vacuum of space.
45:44When we looked at a full mechanical counterpressure suit,
45:47you have to have total counterpressure in all areas of the body.
45:51And, of course, as you flex your elbow
45:52or under your shoulder area, under the arms,
45:55in the crotch area, you have these discontinuities,
45:57and they have to be filled some way.
45:59And we find that you had to put either foam pads in those areas
46:03or some sort of a gelatin-filled bag.
46:05And so this now makes this system even more complex
46:09to try to integrate.
46:11Then you have to have the individual donning this system,
46:13and that was another problem,
46:15because these layers of material,
46:16each layer of material perhaps gave a counterpressure
46:19of somewhere on the order of a pound and a half.
46:21But it took about two or three of these layers
46:23to give full counterpressure.
46:25And so they had to slip on these layers individually,
46:27and the donning sequence was somewhat laborious.
46:32But 25 years ago,
46:33materials technology was the limiting factor.
46:37Today, there is a renewed enthusiasm
46:39for these failed ideas,
46:41because Mars has an atmosphere
46:43of about 1% the pressure on Earth
46:45that might allow the use of a modern version
46:47of the skin suit.
46:48I don't think there's enough difference to argue about.
46:52Where we want to be
46:53may look something like this,
46:56to something that looks pretty much
46:57like the Buck Rogers concept,
46:59a suit that is form-fitting
47:00and a very small life support system.
47:03People have been trying to develop this concept
47:05since about 1965,
47:07and they have not been successful generally
47:09because of materials problems.
47:13However, with the biological revolution
47:16that's in process now
47:18and our ability perhaps to tailor protein molecules,
47:21there may be a breakthrough out there in the future
47:25that would allow us to make a material
47:29out of a protein-like substance
47:32that could perhaps do this job for us.
47:35And my belief is that such a suit
47:38would be considerably lighter
47:39and would reduce the ventilation requirements
47:42of the life support system
47:44and allow the life support system
47:45to come down in size dramatically.
47:51What this requires
47:52is the revolution in spacesuit design
47:54as profound as the change
47:55from the old lead-weighted divers' outfits
47:57to today's scuba suits.
47:59Mars suits that are like a second skin
48:16might seem like space fiction,
48:19but for some,
48:21this development is simply a matter of emphasis,
48:24an emphasis on science
48:25rather than engineering.
48:26When you begin with a philosophy
48:31that you're going to drive the design
48:32of the suit by science,
48:34you end up with a totally different package
48:37than if you let engineering go away
48:40and design something for the scientists.
48:42In Apollo and in shuttle
48:44and projective for station,
48:46what we've done is we've taken a suit
48:48that's evolved,
48:48really evolved from the Gemini days,
48:50even before the Gemini days,
48:51starting with the soft suit concept,
48:53and let it evolve through engineering changes
48:57and kind of bolted these changes on
48:59and made it more complex
49:01and gave it more capability.
49:03But what we were really doing
49:04was starting with an engineering device
49:05and then foisting it on the scientists.
49:08There was really only one scientist
49:09who's ever used an Apollo suit,
49:11and that was Harrison Schmidt on Apollo 17.
49:14He was a geologist.
49:15And that's because Apollo was an engineering mission.
49:19Mars is not an engineering mission.
49:21Mars is a permanent habitation scientist mission.
49:24People are going to go out
49:25and they always say the same thing.
49:26We want to get our hands dirty.
49:27We want to get out there and dig and build,
49:29and those are the things we want to do.
49:31If you're going to do that,
49:32you've got to ask the scientists,
49:33and you've got to find out
49:34what they want to do exactly,
49:35and how much work,
49:36and what kind of picks,
49:37and what kind of slopes
49:37they're going to climb up,
49:38and how long they're going to do this,
49:39and how long they're going to do that.
49:41When you have all that information,
49:42then you've got the requirements necessary
49:45to think about designing a suit.
49:46But the last thing in the world you want to do
49:48is give this thing to engineers first,
49:50and let them build a suit for you.
49:59If a Mars mission is going to be devoted
50:02to going and planting flags and footprints,
50:04simply going to Mars and coming back
50:05and saying,
50:06we've been there and bringing back some samples,
50:07nobody wants to do it.
50:10The philosophy is one of permanent habitation,
50:12and permanent settlement.
50:15Ultimately, we're talking about settlement.
50:17Settlement means perhaps more ordinary people.
50:21It certainly means family.
50:24Can't you see the situation
50:25where a couple has a baby,
50:28and it becomes a milestone in that child's life
50:31when it's allowed to go outside the first time
50:34in its own little space suit?
50:36The story is a little bit different.
50:37The story is a little bit different.
50:38The story is a little bit different.
50:39The story is a little bit different.
50:40The story is a little bit different.
50:41The story is a little bit different.
50:42The story is a little bit different.
50:43The story is a little bit different.
50:44The story is a little bit different.
50:45The story is a little bit different.
50:46The story is a little bit different.
50:47The story is a little bit different.
50:48The story is a little bit different.
50:49The story is a little bit different.
50:50The story is a little bit different.
50:51The story is a little bit different.
50:52The story is a little bit different.
50:53The story is a little bit different.
50:54The story is a little bit different.
50:55The story is a little bit different.
50:56The story is a little bit different.
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