Golden-age sci-fi fans, rejoice! The future is finally here. Your skintight spacesuit has arrived:
Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT… is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon. Her spandex and nylon BioSuit is not your grandfather’s spacesuit–think more Spiderman, less John Glenn.
Newman’s prototype suit is a revolutionary departure from the traditional model. Instead of using gas pressurization, which exerts a force on the astronaut’s body to protect it from the vacuum of space, the suit relies on mechanical counter-pressure, which involves wrapping tight layers of material around the body. The trick is to make a suit that is skintight but stretches with the body, allowing freedom of movement.
Key to their design is the pattern of lines on the suit, which correspond to lines of non-extension (lines on the skin that don’t extend when you move your leg). Those lines provide a stiff “skeleton” of structural support, while providing maximal mobility.
Let’s see… private spacecraft, check; personal cleaning robots, check; skintight spacesuit, check; wrist computer with videphone, check; bionic limbs, check; OK, who’s working on the jetpacks?
