How to Design a Perfect Space Suit
The David Clark Company may not be a household name among the fashionistas, yet it is instrumental in the world of innovation, especially as far as spaceflight is concerned. It was David Clark who first designed a lower-body compression suit to help sustain blood circulation, thus developing the world’s first anti-gravity space suit. Since then, David Clark has played an instrumental role in designing almost every generation of space suit.
To be a space designer means creating the literal boundary of life and death for the people wearing those designs. “A business suit adapts you to a meeting, a swimsuit adapts you to a pool, a space suit adapts you for space — and transforms you as a result into literally an angel, in the classical sense,” says Nicholas de Monchaux, a University of California at Berkeley professor and the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. He notes that the word “space” was coined by the English poet John Milton to describe a space between the worlds of humans and that of gods and angels.
Space suit design involves creativity and innovation with a vision: it requires solving problems that are not encountered in any other context. For example, a design for an Orion suit — to be used outside the Earth’s orbit, including on missions to the moon and to Mars — must withstand extended cabin pressure loss.
“If you picture the suit as a human-shaped balloon, the materials of the suit have to hold that pressure and control it,” says Shane Jacobs, a design manager at David Clark. The Orion suit has to be able to perform a number of tasks, such as regulating its own temperature and allowing the astronaut to eat, sleep and breathe for as long as six days.
The Orion suit is quite different from the suit Jacobs created for the Starliner, the International Space Stationshuttle. Because as many as five passengers are cramped in 11.3 cubic meters, the suits had to be light and compact, and the helmets were made to be softer and more flexible.
Developing a Space Suit
Astronauts sustain a number of work-related injuries, some of which can be solved with proper suit design, says Michael Lye of Rhode Island School of Design. Each suit must be fitted to the astronaut, otherwise it increases risks of chafing and falling. Issues to be considered include ventilation, fracture and pressure.
“There are so many dimensions to us, such incredible dexterity,” said Lye. Together with his students, he created modular suits so that parts could be chosen to fit a particular astronaut. Lye’s recent suit design project was for NASA’s Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, a Mars simulator on the slopes of a Hawaiian volcano.
The advancement in computer technologies have made headway for space suit design: designer Clement Balavoine is relying on virtual fittings for future Mars mission spacesuits, and David Clark is collaborating with MIT on a long-term project that would enable designers to track the stress suits experience in virtual space and the effects on joints.
After the Apollo mission, David Clark learned that the abrasive dust on the moon or Mars requires extra protection
How does one go about creating a space suit? It’s a hands-on approach at first for both Jacobs and Lye. They begin by asking questions about mobility and visibility required, and the range of motion the astronaut will need. Then comes the testing — what Jacobs refers to as the “build a little, test a little” phase. It is not unusual for a designer to try on the suit, too: “That allows you to say, ‘I really need this [missing element]’ or ‘Jeez, it’s hot in this thing,’” Jacobs says. “That will drive you to explore different solutions.”
Elaborate testing is the final stage of design — pieces are tested individually, with machines performing thousands of repeated actions such as bending elbow hinges. Then, the egress tests take place, when astronauts test the suits in exit situations on water or land, or even in a test “emergency.”
The Final Frontier
For de Monchaux, space suit design is more than innovation and technology — he sees it as a significant development in the national identity. There was an “explicitly encouraged relationship between the closing of the Western frontier at the end of 19th century and the opening of frontiers of aviation,” he says. “We had reached the end of the continent and the end of our potential. It was very explicitly and carefully redefined as upward and outward.” With space deemed “the final frontier,” de Monchaux says that Americans strive to discover, explore and settle new territories. Space travel allows just that.
What we imagine often turns into reality. “It’s impossible for anyone, including the hardest-core engineer, to get away from the cultural impressions we have about the future,” Lye says. “Whether you do it consciously or unconsciously, everyone is being influenced by that. You can go back and look at spacesuits and space travel, at early science fiction, and see similarities in what gets proposed now.”
Even something is innocuous as color is deeply ingrained in cultural traditions. “The association between shiny stuff and things that are not of this world goes back to the dawn of civilization,” de Monchaux says, giving examples of the silver and gold on clothes worn by bishops and priests. The BF Goodrich designers who created one of the first space suits surely did paint it silver. However, for practical reasons, silver, which attracted too much light, was soon changed to a less-reflective white. This change caused the trend on Earth of associating the color white with all space-related things.
“It’s really a complex semiotic back-and-forth between science fact and science fiction; they both shape each other,” says de Monchaux. “There’s not an easy separation between them.”
New Materials Offer New Functionalities
Jacobs says that because the private sector is involved in space exploration, the focus is less on cinching pennies as was the case with government programs, and now has expanded from function and form into aesthetics. “With our suits for the Starliner, we certainly put way more into thinking not just about function but also form,” he says. “Everybody wants to wear a space suit; you don’t want to just be going up in your regular everyday clothes. You want to look cool.”
Even with suits that don’t require much functionality — such as the IVA (intra-vehicular activity) suits that don’t leave the spacecraft — one sees the narrative of exploration being woven. “It’s really something to see how a company like SpaceX goes about creating an image of what space travel is going to be,” Lye says, referring to a suit recently unveiled by the company.
The process of design involves a significant amount of trial and error. After the Apollo mission, David Clark learned that the abrasive dust on the moon or Mars requires extra protection. “They were on the moon three days, but their suits came back super dirty,” Jacobs says. “It got into the zippers and everything.” The company then introduced a new outer space lawyer called an environmental protective garment, designed to protect against micrometeoroids, small flecks of rock or paint.
With one of the biggest challenges involving the ability to mimic the natural dexterity of the human body, Jacobsthinks that the development of new materials offer tremendous promise. One example is the Starliner suits, which now use materials to regulate heat on their own and are much more comfortable for astronauts. The protective garment also uses a new material that can break up any object traveling at an immense speed.
From Space to Earth
Once again, our vision of space dictates the design, and design in space circles back to fashion on Earth. David Clark recently collaborated with Reebok on new space suit footwear, using new materials in the sole to make it lighter. Reebok then adapted the same material for sneakers it sold commercially on Earth. Jacobs imagines that similar feedback could follow the Starliner suit materials. “I hope to be able to ride my bike with phase-change materials: to feel cool when it’s warm, warm when it’s cool,” he says. “Maybe with a little liquid cooling garment that’s powered by my bike pedals.” Lye also speaks of these technological spin-offs, citing the compression garments invented to treat diabetes and circulation problems — a solution that was created based on the anti-gravity suits.
Even with these practical applications, Lye thinks that the more important issue is how the effects of space suit design figure into the big picture, causing social change back home, such as the environmentalist movement. “A lot of the strength of the environmental movement came from the ‘blue marble,’” he says, citing the first full-color shot of Earth. “That crystallized in everybody’s mind new ideas about the Earth and its value.”
Lye believes that it will happen again when we explore Mars and enter the new space travel era. Interest in space will highlight the fact “that we’re taking extreme measures to get away from this mess that we created ourselves, and that we could probably find a way to fix,” he says.
Photo credits: NASA
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