WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA on Tuesday showed off two new spacesuits tailored for future moon walking astronauts, signaling development of a crucial component to the space agency\u2019s accelerated drive to return to the moon by 2024. Two NASA engineers strutted on a stage inside the agency\u2019s Washington, D.C. headquarters, donning the new spacesuits, modeling and doing squats and crunches in front of a crowd of students and reporters to reveal what the first zero-gravity space-wear under NASA\u2019s Artemis moon program would look like. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is the first suit we\u2019ve designed in about 40 years,\u201d Chris Hansen, a manager at NASA\u2019s spacesuit design office, said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat you saw today was a prototype of the pressure garment. The life support system is back in a lab in Houston,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want systems that allow our astronauts to be scientists on the surface of the moon\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBasically, my job is to take a basketball, shape it like a human, keep them alive in a harsh environment, and give them the mobility to do their job,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new suits come as a much-needed upgrade to NASA\u2019s astronaut wardrobe. Astronauts Christina Koch and Anne McClain were slated in March to conduct the first ever all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station, but the mission was called off because there weren\u2019t enough spacesuits available on the station for both of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another attempt for the first all-female spacewalk, a roughly six-hour crawl on the exterior of the space station to install new batteries, is back on for Thursday, NASA said in a news release on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
The Trump administration in March directed NASA to land humans on the moon by 2024, accelerating a goal to colonize the moon as a staging ground for eventual missions to Mars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One suit of orange fabric will be worn by astronauts when inside the spacecraft. Astronauts will wear a much bigger mostly white suit on the lunar surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new suits make it much easier to walk, bend and squat when walking on the lunar surface, Amy Ross, NASA\u2019s lead spacesuit engineer, said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA on Tuesday showed off two new spacesuits tailored for future moon walking astronauts, signaling development of a crucial component to the space agency\u2019s accelerated drive to return to the moon by 2024. Two NASA engineers strutted on a stage inside the agency\u2019s Washington, D.C. headquarters, donning the new spacesuits, modeling and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casgc.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}