I am skeptical on the abilities of this suit. Where would you fit the personal heating and cooling? Where do you attack the jet pack, wont zero air pressure cause it to explode?

It looks like a toy prototype.

Similar suits were tested over 20 years ago in vacuum chambers. They were described several places, notably Jerry Porunell's science fiction of the early 1980's. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

reminds me of the suits worn in the gundam animes. Now all need are giant robots!

The material can have electrical heating materials woven inside or have another layer to produce the heating and cooling capabilities.

Are we not breathing in space anymore either?

It is ugly as all hell. I know looks might not be all that important in outer space or Mars, but c'mon! It is very dorky. Not sexy at all like the article describes it.

the main reason for the bulk of current space suits is they have to maintain a very high pressure difference to keep the suit from exploding. this causes them to be very bulky and heavy. the idea behind these skintight suits is that they provide the pressure on the astronaut's skin instead of air providing pressure. this requires much less bulk and allows for a greater range of movement. and yes, heating and cooling could be integrated into the suits just as they are today. it's not like this is nylon underwear with nowhere to attach a maneuverability booster thing. they're about as thick as your hand, so i'm sure they'd have some sort of spot on the back to contain oxygen and whatnot.

Space is a vacuum or more precisely -101.3 kPa. In terms of materials suitability to this environment, there is a whole host. Extending from silk, or kevlar, carbon nano fibre and many other exotic and not so exotic materials. Running of heating or cooling lines within the very fabric of the suit is'nt hard. It is imagination and effort - no more no less.

You can´t compare today´s tech with that of 20 years ago, example: goretech

for that quote from aeon flux

As another user said, I've always understood that the reason those suits are so bulky is because you have to find a way to insulate against the cold vacuum of space. And a skin tight suit ain't going to cut it. Hell even in a sci-fi show like Star Trek they don't have skin tight suits.

I think new space suits need to be developed, but they're not going to be skin tight. Not and still be able to keep the person warm and able to move around.

I think we can safely assume an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics understands the harshness of the environment and the subsequent suit requirements.

Synthetic materials are much different today than 20 years ago. 10 more years of testing, designing, and rebuilding will probably lead to something. Science fiction is just that... fiction until it's attempted and accomplished.

It may not seem like much compared to what strolls down a Paris fashion runway. But, compared to any actual, previous space suit? Miles ahead.

Admittedly the concepts aren't anything that couldn't have been read in sci-fi 20 years ago. What is new is that these are attempts at making the real deal. Not some figment in a writers head of what could be.

I imagine gloves are still the tuff part. maintaining finger dexterity through pressure differences is tough.

We could also assume that government contractors would agree on whether to use the metric system, but in the case of the mars lander, we would be wrong.

Wow. The skeptics in here amaze me. Where would the world be today if skeptics ran the show?

"I'm sorry Mr. Bell, but your idea for a 'telephonic' device that transmits voice over a copper wire is (excuse the pun) patently absurd!"

"Cosmic speed limits? Warps in space? Black holes and wormholes? Mr. Einstein, your nuts!"

"Mr. Rutherford, are you trying to tell me that atoms (which, by definition, are the smallest unit of matter) are actually composed of smaller things? If atoms are the smallest things there are, but they are made up of these other, smaller things, then, ergo, atoms are not atoms at all! Do you propose to rewrite the very foundations of our science? Preposterous!"

"Shockley, enough of this 'transconductive varistor' nonsense. Those Germans couldn't get it to work in the 20's and 30's; there's no way you're going to get it to work today! Besides, we've already got vaccuum tubes, why would we need something else that does the same thing?"


Care for more? I think I made my point. And to preempt those who would criticize my armchair historianism ("but Bell wasn't the first to invent the telephone!"), you obviously didn't get the message. Read it again, smack the palm of your hand into your forehead, and say "duh!"

Many of the comments are questioning whether or not it would really be "skin tight." The answer is, probably not in the same way that we would think of with an over tight shirt.

Most likely the term "skin tight" was chosen as a relative comparison between the concept space suit and bulky, bloated, and heavy space suit we are familiar with.

As for feasibility, it should be technically possible to get enough insulation, be climate controlled, and maintain the pressure difference with a 2~4 cm thick suit.

Somebody sarcastically asked if we were still breathing in space. I assume your intention was to ask how someone could breath with their chest being restricted by this concept suit. The solution is fairly simple and it would solve the question of mounting jets to an all fabric like suit. All you need is a stiff breastplate like structure that goes around the chest with enough room to allow for the chest to expand when breathing.

This also provides a viable load path for any equipment needing to be attached.

Really, all of this has been discussed at length before and many alternatives are perfectly viable. A little reading on the subject will help understand the problems of different space suit designs. Google it. Wikipedia is also a good sources for none-controversial subjects like this.

first of all the human body produces enough heat to keep itself warm, all you need to do is to insulate it from the outside, it works wonders on mount everest and antactica, how to do that, well take a look at aerogel, secondly no you will not explode in space if you are not exposed to vacuum, its a simple matter of pascals laws, what makes a person "explode" is the sudden evaporation of all fluids in your body. Oh and your skin only need a fraction of the air that you breathe, thats why you can dive in the ocean with a wetsuit. the biggest problem they will face is to remove excess heat from inside the suit.

but on a side note this all reminds me of a passage from the Arthur C Clarke book, The Hammer of God, where the universities have marathon race on the moon

The biggest issue when designing a space suit is protection against micrometeorites and space debris. This is the primary reason for the bulk of the current style of space suit.

Orbital speed is around 11km/sec (7 miles/sec), so even a passing grain of sand will hit you with 11 times the velocity of a sniper's bullet. In order to avoid puncture, current space suits carry 8 layers of kevlar as reinforcement.

The other big issue is that of radiation protection: once outside the earth's magnetic field, you can easily be exposed to huge levels of radiation from solar flares - a flare could typically produce >6000 rads, where 450 rads is considered fatal in 50% of cases. The suit must shield against this, requiring dense (and heavy) material.

Temperature management is much more easily solved than these (though with only radiative transfer possible in space, it can become and issue), as is maintaining of pressure on the skin (1 atmosphere of pressure is not much, after all).

References:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1994/safe-0105.html
http://www.eas.asu.edu/~holbert/eee460/spacerad.html

Depends!

Heating the suit is easy, but cooling it would be difficult. What sort of technology can you think of to cool it? Especially woven in as has been suggested.

I could think that a system where heat is removed is as easy as uncovering plates that are covered by the material. If you need to bleed off heat, uncover patches on the suit, the heat will bleed off in proportion to the amount of covering removed.
Since the entire suit would be covered in this material, which the heat absorption runs through, you can cool the entire suit, (albeit not as evenly as you might like) by uncovering a few patches in certain areas.

Have you ever read how hot an object on the moon can become? "The temperature on the sunlit side (of our moon)may be 250 degrees F.

That is the problem you have a huge temperature variability the suit needs to heat (that is covered) and cool when ambient temperature would be way higher. In a vacuum what is going to carry the heat away anyway?

you have some good points. But the fact is that nothing that NASA, ESA or any other space agency has at the moment will stop micro meteorites. Take the space station it is only rated to take impacts of metorites less then 1cm in diameter.

I will agree with you on the radiation if and when they start going to Mars, but even the apollo crew only got exposed to an average of less then 1 rad
http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/books/apollo/S2ch3.htm

mainly due to being protected by earths shadown and the low solarflare season. and I do not think they would be allowed outside in a strong flare season.

I still see the biggest issue being heat and cooling, as it was said you can only radiate heat, this is partialy true, the current space suits actualy use conduction, the underwear carries water that is regulated in the backpack or released into space if it gets to hot. extrapolate that and use a fluid as a heatsink not nessesary water, that absorbs heat and then carry that back to the shuttle when you can have a larger heat radiation system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_suit