Space fashion

I love a good space suit. One of my favorite stories involving spacesuits is Arthur C. Clarke's 1958 short story "Who's There?", about an astronaut who steps off into space only to encounter something strange inside his suit mid-mission. Over the years, books, TV shows, films, and games have all depicted suits of various types, some good, some bad. But they're almost always cool to look at.

Ever since I was a kid learning about the space race and lunar landings, I've thought that space suits are some of the coolest pieces of equipment that we've ever devised. When you break it down to its core elements, it's a tiny fragment of Earth that you're bringing with you, and there's so much potential wrapped up in the layers of fabric and rubber and plastic.

Earlier this week, the private space firm Axiom Space unveiled the spacesuit that NASA's Artemis astronauts will wear on the moon when we make our next landing. It's called the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit, and it's really a gorgeous piece of equipment. It looks a bit like the classic A7L spacesuits that the Apollo astronauts wore on the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, and a bit like the modern Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) that astronauts now wear for spacewalks onboard the International Space Station, but it looks sleeker and a bit more versatile. (And it looks much better than SpaceX's suit, which has always felt to me like it needs a belt or something.)

Space suits are complicated pieces of equipment. Nicholas de Monchaux's phenomenal book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo is an excellent look into the development of the spacesuit and how deceptive and intricate they are to assemble and wear. These aren't things that you can merely throw on and jump out of an airlock and go walking around: in addition to the numerous layers of material that seamstresses hand sewed together, they're garments that have to withstand incredible variations in temperature, hold water, air, waste, and have to allow someone to actually move. Every piece of equipment that gets flown in space needs to be completely rethought and reconstructed in order to operate in those extremes. Earl Swift's 2021 book Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings is another good window into the development and deployment of these items.

Axiom's spacesuit is undoubtably building on the things that we learned from the Apollo missions and the other EVA excursions that we've conducted in the decades since. In their release, they highlighted that these suits are designed to work with both male and female astronauts across a range of body types – no small feat considering that NASA's original astronauts were men and the first American woman to conduct an EVA was astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan in 1984.

Writing in The New York Times in 2019, science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal pointed out that if NASA is serious about returning to the Moon and hoping to go elsewhere, it will need to fundamentally examine the hidden gender biases that crop up throughout the space program. The EMU suit was based off of the Apollo spacesuit designs, she writes, suits that were designed for men. And while NASA had planned to produce additional suits in a range of sizes, for "budget reasons, the extra-small, small and extra-large suits were cut. However, many of the male astronauts could not fit into the large suits, so the bigger size was brought back. The smaller sizes never were."

As a result, when NASA happened to have a pair of women scheduled for a spacewalk in 2019, they had to shuffle the staffing, because they only had one suit that would fit both of the women. The first all-female spacewalk took place months later, when astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir went out to conduct some repairs on the ISS.

Axiom touts the flexibility of this new suit in its announcement. Not only can it fit a range of bodies and withstand various conditions on the moon, one detail stood out to me: the AxEMU will use a "single, foundational architecture," meaning that they'll be able to adjust and modify it with standardized parts depending on the mission. NASA is in the midst of a years-long crisis with its spacesuits, and they've had to swap out or trade parts to keep the suits that they've got functioning. As parts break or malfunction, the shortage hampers NASA's ability to field astronauts for critical repairs or to conduct their work. If we're going to the moon, this can't happen, and the space agency really needs to get its infrastructure ducks in a row in order for these missions to go off smoothly. Even when it was operating routine spaceflights, NASA had a habit of swapping parts between the space shuttles, as Adam Higginbotham notes in his book Challengers, something that put serious strains on their operational capabilities.

Despite plans, NASA isn't likely to land on the moon in 2026 with Artemis III. The agency is far behind its schedule to return to the moon, and with this year's contentious election throwing no small amount of uncertainty into the mix, it will likely be a while before we see these suits deployed to the Moon's surface or used during an EVA. But it is exciting to see that these suits have come this far. They're not over the finish line yet: Axiom says that they're in the final development stretch and have to undergo a battery of tests in the next year or so before they're actually manufactured.

I really dig the look of this suit: they look functional and practical, and I'm excited to see them used on the lunar surface in the (hopefully) next couple of years. What's particularly neat is that these suits will be equipped with lights and HD cameras (I think the mounts are above the helmet's visor?) which should beam back plenty of footage from the EVAs that those astronauts will eventually undertake – something that I'm sure will provide no shortage of inspiration for plenty of scientists and science fiction writers in the years that follow.