In June 2022, NASA announced that it had contracted the design and development of their new space suits to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace. But now Collins Aerospace has withdrawn from the project. According to the same company, they acknowledge that they are very late in the process and very over budget.
The suits that the two companies were going to develop were going to be used for both spacewalks on the International Space Station (ISS) as son the surface of the Moon. NASA’s idea was to rent them to the two companies just as it does, for example, with manned launches and SpaceX.
So NASA is going to stay now with a single supplier –which seems to be doing well– instead of two. Although perhaps the agency could request proposals again to avoid it. One candidate could be SpaceX, which has already designed a suit for space walks for the Polaris program. Only it is not an autonomous suit but has to be connected by an umbilical at all times to the Crew Dragon.
The news comes just a couple of days after NASA had to cancel a spacewalk to the ISS due to a water leak in the suit Tracy Caldwell Dyson was wearing. And those suits are already more than forty years old and They have more and more ailmentsno matter how much maintenance is done to them.
The curious thing – or not, given what was seen with the Crew Dragon and the Starliner – is that Axiom Space is relatively new in space exploration. Although it does not lack ambition: it wants to launch a private space station, although first it will dock some of its modules to the ISS, and it has already successfully carried out several private manned space missions to the Station.
While Collins Aerospace, for its part, has been in the sector for decades. And it has the experience of ILC Dover in the design of the space suits used on the lunar walks of the Apollo program and in the suits now used for spacewalks on the US segment of the ISS. Although It doesn’t seem to have been of much use to you..
But despite everything, it is not at all clear when the Axiom suit could be ready. So NASA still has a few years to go with the current ones.
