NASA's spacesuit problem just got a lot worse

NASA has a huge spacesuit problem, and it’s just getting worse. This has been a bad few weeks for NASA’s already terrible spacesuit situation. Let’s break down what’s been going on, and why it’s gotten to this point.

On June 13, NASA announced that a scheduled spacewalk would be postponed due to a “spacesuit discomfort issue.” The astronauts had already almost fully suited up and were in the airlock, and the call came through about an hour before the astronauts were set to head out.

We found out later at a press conference that the problem was with Matthew Dominick’s EMU, or Extravehicular Mobility Unit, (he was one of the two astronauts performing the EVA, along with Tracy Dyson). They weren’t able to resolve the issue immediately and they didn’t want to potentially leave this spacewalk unfinished, so they cancelled it altogether.

We don’t know the specifics of this discomfort issue, but these suits are not exactly comfortable under the best of circumstances — I’ll get into more about the spacesuits themselves later. Astronauts are used to operating in these unwieldy, uncomfortable suits — they train on them extensively, so for an EVA to have been cancelled over this, there must have been something big.

NASA rescheduled the EVA for June 24, but swapped out Matthew Dominick for Mike Barratt — so they fixed the discomfort issue by swapping astronauts instead of suits.

So we get to June 24 — and they’re suiting up again and out in the airlock— and Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit starts leaking coolant. Apparently there was water everywhere, all over the airlock. Now, no one was ever in danger, but a water leak in a spacesuit is a HUGE deal. It could literally kill an astronaut. In 2014, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano had up to one and a half liters of water in his helmet, and he was struggling to see and breathe. This is a big deal.

There’s currently a spacesuit review to see what exactly went wrong, but for now the July 2 spacewalk is still on the calendar. Remember, Boeing Starliner is still at the ISS, and is having to coordinate its undocking with these scheduled spacewalks, so it is quite complicated — plus they have a limited supply at oxygen at the ISS for these spacewalks, and they used almost a full EVA’s worth of oxygen during the June 13 attempt. At this point they probably only have enough oxygen for one more spacewalk attempt — and like the spacesuits, the ISS is aging, and needs these EVAs for maintenance.

To make matters even more complicated, on June 25, Eric Berger at Ars Technica broke the story that Collins Aerospace, which was one of the providers under contract with NASA to design the next generation of spacesuits, has backed out of their contract. Apparently Collins was very behind schedule, spent too much money and was too far behind, and they decided to cut their losses. Understandable, but yet another blow to the spacesuit situation.

So, what is going on with these spacesuits?

Well, the bottom line is that — they’re old. These are the Space Shuttle era spacesuits. The original EMU development started in 1974, and they were first flown in 1981, with the first EVA in 1983. When NASA realized they were going to have to modify the suit to be able to handle a lot more EVAs, they developed the enhanced EMUs, an upgrade to the original. Development for that began in 1990, with the first EVA in 1998, and these are still in use. They were originally only designed to last 15 years. They’re well beyond their intended life.

Back during Apollo, spacesuits were custom made for the wearer. That changed during the Space Shuttle era because there were a lot more astronauts, and to make each of them a custom space suit was too unwieldy. Instead, NASA chose to make spacesuits in different sizes. The idea was that astronauts could mix and match torsos, arms, and legs to create a spacesuit that fit, which largely hasn’t worked well in practice.

How these EMUs work

There are two main parts of an EMU — the pressure suit and the life support system. The pressure suit is the outside part that maintains pressure in the near-vacuum of space, while the life support system is the backpack astronauts wear.

When astronauts are suiting up for an EVA, they first put on a cooling garment, which is a close-fitting garment made up of spandex and about 300 feet of water tubes that provides cooling and remove extra heat during the spacewalk. Heat is a huge problem, because you might be thinking that space is cold and that’s true — but a spacewalk lasts multiple hours and this is a sealed suit. There’s nowhere for that body heat to go. That’s where the cooling garments come in.

The Hard Upper Torso is next, and it’s basically a sleeveless torso that comes in multiple sizes. It has the display control module which is the control panel for the suit, We’ll talk about this piece more later, because it’s relevant when we talk about sizing. Then there are the gloves, which have built in heaters, and the lower torso (which is the lower part of the spacesuit — the pants, boots, that sort of thing.

The portable life support system or PLSS, which connects with the hard upper torso, provides electricity, a fan, removes carbon dioxide from the air, a water tank for the cooling garment, and a two-way radio. And then of course, there’s the helmet.

The Hard Upper Torso in particular has gotten a lot of scrutiny in recent years when the highly-publicized all-women spacewalk was canceled in 2019. Many news outlets boiled it down to “they don’t have enough spacesuits to fit women” which was entirely true, but it’s also more complicated than that.

The mess that is spacesuit sizing (and how it affects women)

Spacesuit sizing is a mess. As I mentioned, rather than customizing the spacesuit to the wearer, NASA manufactured hard upper torsos, arms, and lower torsos in different sizes to provide a mix and match experience. This didn’t take into account that many women’s bodies are differently shaped than men’s — women can have wider hips, narrower shoulders, that sort of thing.

That makes it even harder for the women astronauts to fit into these spacesuits, and NASA has acknowledged that one of the problems with its current EMUs is the fact that it limits the astronauts who can perform EVAs. It also limits astronaut assignments because anyone assigned to the ISS has to be EVA certified. The astronauts who are too small for the medium torso, which are disproportionately women, can’t be assigned to an ISS flight, and that’s the only assignment there is right now besides Artemis.

In the case of the all-female spacewalk, at that time on the ISS, in terms of functional ready to use hard upper torsos, there was one medium, two large, and one extra large. Most astronauts prefer the EMUs be as close fitting as possible, because it enhances maneuverability and dexterity within the bulky suits. The spacewalk was supposed to be with astronauts Christina Koch and Anne McClain — McClain had trained on both the medium and the large torsos, but reported that she was more comfortable in the medium torso. Because there was only one medium torso, they had to replace an astronaut on the space walk (the first all-women spacewalk did happen later, in October 2019.

The thing is, NASA used to have more spacesuits to fit smaller bodied people. They originally planned for extra small and small hard upper torsos. NASA never ended up making an XS, and they stopped making the small (which reportedly was still too big for most women) in the 1990s because of budget cuts. They never built the enhanced EMU in a small. And in 2003, the agency halted plans to explore making spacesuits specifically for smaller women and men, also due to budget.

I pinged NASA last week to see what the current situation aboard the ISS is. They currently have four spacesuits available for EVAS — one medium, one large, and two extra larges. There are two additional torsos currently available on the ISS in sizes medium and large which can function as spares but would take hours of prep to get ready for an EVA because they’re not currently paired with one of the four functional life support systems on the ISS.

There were originally 18 life support units built. Four as I mentioned are on the ISS integrated into the functional upper hard torsos, while around 7 are on the ground for maintenance. The rest have basically been destroyed.

Wait, spacesuits have been destroyed? And why aren’t some working?

You have to think of these spacesuits as portable spaceships. These aren’t just garments, so they require regular maintenance. A 2017 report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General points out that the maintenance cycle on these EMUs has been pushed further and further. They were only originally certified for a single Space Shuttle flight when they were built. We’ve gone from that to allowing 6 years or 25 EVAs between maintenance cycles. Given that flights to the ISS can be sporadic, and we had a period of almost a decade where there was only U.S. spacecraft capable of bringing cargo to Earth, some suits went even longer than that without proper maintenance.

Some maintenance can be performed by the astronauts on the ISS, but a lot of it — and improvements to the suit — need to happen on the ground. It’s a scheduling nightmare.

In addition to the spacesuits on the ground currently undergoing maintenance NASA has lost a lot of spacesuits — the Space Shuttle Challenger, Columbia, cargo mission failures. That doesn’t help the situation any, as they’re not building new ones. It would be cost prohibitive to do so, an estimated $250 million just for the life support system because the tech is just so old at this point. NASA would rather spend its limited money developing a new spacesuit than trying to build more of the old one.

Ok, so then…why don’t we have the next-gen spacesuits already?

Part of the problem here is that for a long time NASA didn’t have a firm direction. To be able to come up with the parameters and agency requirements for a spacesuit, they have to know where they’re going to go. The cancellation of the Constellation program, which was originally supposed to succeed the Space Shuttle, was a big blow for developing the next-gen spacesuit. Artemis picked up the pieces of Constellation, and now NASA has a direction and knows where it’s going — but it had to start from scratch basically.

That brings us to the Collins Aerospace announcement, and I swear I’m almost done talking to you about spacesuits. Axiom Space is the other contractor developing a next-gen spacesuit, and they’re more on schedule and aren’t burning through money. I get so many questions about why NASA often picks two contractors for these big jobs (you can imagine the comments I’m getting about Boeing and SpaceX right now, with the Starliner situation), and this is exactly why — redundancy.

It’s unclear at this point how Collins backing out might affect the timeline of spacesuit development. This is another contract like commercial crew, for more on how Commercial Crew works, check out my video on Boeing Starliner. But NASA is helping pay for the development of these spacesuits, and then will basically rent them from the company. Axiom has a bigger incentive to do this because they have private astronaut missions, and would actually probably use a spacesuit on their flights.

It’s interesting to note that SpaceX is also working on next-generation spacesuits for their Polaris program, which will be the first EVAs from a private spacecraft. I talked about these spacesuits in a previous newsletter. The question is will NASA pay to use these spacesuits if they’re ready in the next few years and pass their agency requirements (or can easily be modified to do so)? It’s possible.

Like everything in space, this is a complicated situation, but I hope I broke it down well for you here.