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New space suit to allow sleeker space travel

Updated Thu. Jul. 19 2007 12:10 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

A sleeker and slimmer design for space suits is set to make future ventures into space an easier ride.

While the traditionally heavy and cumbersome space suit uses air pressure to emulate the weight of the Earth's atmosphere, the newly designed suit is based on maps of the human body in motion. It relies on counter-pressure where elastic material is tightly wrapped around the body.

The development of the new space suit -- dubbed the BioSuit -- was led by Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"We squeeze the skin if you will. We will keep the astronauts alive by applying the pressure directly to the skin, so it's a very tight fitting suit," Newman told CTV's Canada AM.

The lightweight design of the spandex and nylon BioSuit differs from the traditional space suit. The traditional outfits give astronauts protection, but their weight limits the mobility of the astronauts. The weight of the traditional space suit is close to 150 kilograms and much of the energy exerted by the astronauts is dedicated to basic movement.

This development of the BioSuit is significant and it could be used on missions to Mars that may take place within the next decade.

"When we're thinking about going to the moon or Mars we really need to enable our astronauts to provide locomotion and the current suit is not a locomotion suit," Newman said. "So we've come up with a system that is very flexible and mobile and very light as well."

Another benefit of the new space suit is safety. Any damage to traditional space suits would require an astronaut to immediately return to the space station to avoid life-threatening decompression. However, a small puncture to a BioSuit can be wrapped like a bandage and won't affect the functionality of the suit.

According to Newman, the new space suit she has designed with the assistance of funding from NASA could be ready to be used on space missions within 10 years.

The current version of the BioSuit exerts pressures of about 20 kilopascals on whoever is wearing it. To be considered for use in space however, the suit needs to exert a pressure of 30 kilopascals.

Newman said the theoretical framework for the space suit she has been developing for the past seven years with her colleague Jeff Hoffman, her students and a design firm, was laid in the 1960s and 1970s by the researchers Dr. Paul Webb and Dr. Saul Iberall.

With the advent of appropriate materials and improved engineering design, their ideas are finally closer to reality.

"We're kind of taking it hopefully to the next level," Newman said.