Sexy attire for space travellers

SPACEX has grand ambitions of commercial missions to the moon and to Mars. In the process, it wants its future travellers’ spacesuits to be not just safe, but also snappy.

“We are putting a lot of effort into design aesthetics, not just utility,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said of the suit this week in a Reddit “ask me anything” session. “It needs to both look like a 21st century spacesuit and work well.”

It’s a safe bet that SpaceX is trying to advance spacesuit design into a more form-fitting look, away from the bulky paradigm that has ruled space travel fashion since at least the summer of 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first strolled on the moon.

A sleek, futuristic suit is also a design marker — much like airlines investing heavily on their crew uniforms — and would help denote SpaceX as a consumer brand.

SpaceX declined to comment on its spacesuit design work, which Musk said will be unveiled later this year.

Given the enormous risks of spaceflight, the gas-pressurised suits currently employed by the US and Russia favour function over form. They’re huge and heavy celestial lifesavers that can weigh as much as 135kg and accommodate everything from thermal and atmospheric protection to carbon dioxide exhaust and human waste.

Dava Newman, a professor of aerospace engineering at MIT, said several new approaches were being considered. One is a skintight “BioSuit” that shrinks onto the body, achieving pressurisation not with gas but with a soft exoskeleton of heat-activated materials that shape to fit the traveller’s frame.

Nasa is working on a new design, the Z-2, which has a composite upper torso that’s firm, a change from the Z-1’s soft material, circa 2012. Testing of the Z-2 began late last year and will lead to changes for another prototype, the planned Z-3. — Bloomberg