August 23, 2021 • 47 mins
How did space suits evolve over the course of the Space Shuttle program, and what has been going on since? And why are spacesuits being blamed for a delay in the Artemis Program?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host
job than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio
and I love all Things sech And we are continuing
our series about space suits and their evolution. So the
(00:25):
last episode we really focused on the suits used in
the Apollo missions. We also talked a lot about pooping
in space, which I felt was necessary to talk about.
It's also necessary to do sometimes, and those Apollo space
which actually did change a bit over time. I'll talk
a little bit about that in this episode, because the
suits that were used in the final missions were a
(00:47):
little different from the earlier ones, but overall they were
mostly kept to the same design once you got to
the block to Apollo missions after the canceled Block one design.
And now we're going to talk a bit about the
p l s S, which, depending upon what source you're reading,
either stands for portable life support system or primary life
(01:10):
support system, but in the case of Apollo, it really
means the backpack. This is the life support system that
attached to the suit and allowed astronauts like Neil Armstrong
to you know, gallivan around on the Moon without being
connected by a life support umbilical tether to you know,
like the lunar module. The p l S S would
(01:31):
provide the pressurization needed inside the suit as well as
the oxygen that the astronauts breathe. The ability to scrub
c O two from the suit also very important, and
it also acted as a cooling system to help with
temperature control with the water cooling. So in addition, astronauts
on the Moon also had an Oxygen Purge System or OPS,
(01:54):
which stood in as an emergency backup should the p
l s S fail. So while it's as oxygen purge
system and it makes it sound like you're getting rid
of all your oxygen, it was a secondary oxygen source,
but it only gave the astronauts really enough time to
be able to return to the lunar module and then
connect their suits back to the module's life support system
(02:16):
if things really went you know, pear shaped. The p
L S S started off in development in nineteen six one,
nearly a decade before one would be used on the Moon,
and that was necessary because we were learning so much
about what would be needed in order to make a
Moon mission successful. So while development was begun back then,
(02:38):
a lot of the stuff we learned would mean we'd
have to change designs. For one thing, engineers learned that
the metabolic requirements to get stuff done in space were
really way higher than what was initially estimated, which meant
astronauts were having to put forth a lot more effort
than was originally guessed, and that meant that the life
(02:59):
support says STEMS would need to keep up with that
in order to supply the necessary oxygen and keep the
astronauts body temperature at an acceptable level. But how do
you cool off the water circulating through the suit. If
you remember, a an inner layer of the suit had
plastic tubes essentially through which water would run and carry
(03:21):
body heat away. Well, you've got to get rid of
that heat, right, you have to have some sort of
heat exchange in order for the water to cool down again.
Otherwise eventually you're just going to be running body temperature
level water or hotter through the suit, and that doesn't
help you with maintaining a right temperature. Well, in this case,
(03:42):
the answer ended up being a plate that to the
naked eye seemed like it was a solid plate, but
in fact it had microscopic pours in that plate, so
warm water from the cooling system would fill up those
pores just a little bit, not a whole lot of water,
and then it would just boil off into space. And
because boiling is an endothermic reaction, it actually carried heat
(04:06):
away from the system, and that would cool the water
that remained, uh, and some of that water would just
freeze in those pores, effectively sealing the pores. But then
this water would get warmed by the cooling system or
the gas circulating system, and the process would repeat itself,
and it would continuously cool as long as you had
(04:28):
enough water running in the system, and you weren't losing
a ton of it, you know, all at once or anything.
It was little bits, so it could run for a
while before being depleted. The invention would end up being
used in many future space technologies, including the International Space Station,
so not just for space suits. Now, I mentioned that
the p LSS had an oxygen supply, which is obviously
(04:51):
a necessary component for a life support system for a
human being, and this was pure oxygen as opposed to
the mix of gases that we breathe here on Earth.
A typical lungfull down here on the planet is nitrogen
twenty one oxygen and then everything else like argonne, carbon dioxide,
(05:12):
and some trace elements. All of that is less than
a percentage point each. However, in a low pressure environment,
going with this kind of mixture could lead to a
dangerous situation in which you don't have enough of a
concentration of O two in the astronauts lungs and their blood.
(05:34):
So most space life support systems actually rely on a
supply of pure oxygen instead. Oh an interesting fact, the
Space Shuttle and the International Space Station have or you know,
in the case of the Space Shuttle had internal atmospheres
that mirrored Earth's atmospheres, and for that reason, astronauts dawning
(05:54):
spacesuits for a n e v A first had to
engage in a bit of pre breathe the activity, which
is somewhat confusing, right, I mean, it's a weird thing
to say, but what it means is that they had
to strap on a mask and breathe pure oxygen for
like a period of like four hours in some cases
before getting into the space suit and relying on the
(06:17):
spacesuits life support system. And the whole reason for doing
that was to have a gradual process to remove nitrogen
from the astronauts blood, which in turn would reduce the
chance that the astronaut would get the bends once heading
into the low pressure environment of outer space, just like
you would see with someone who is you know, deep
sea diving. All right, tangent over, let's get back to
(06:38):
the p l s S. Well, it turns out that
we humans, you know, we breathe an oxygen and we
breathe out carbon dioxide among some other stuff. It's not
just pure CEO two. And if we have a significant
build up of c O two in our environment, and
by significant I mean if CEO two levels rise up
to be about eight percent of what we're breathing, well
(06:58):
we can't breathe proper. Really it actually it becomes toxic,
and obviously that's a problem, potentially a deadly one. So
there had to be a way to remove c O
two from the suit. So you can think of it
as there being one port into which pure oxygen flows in,
and there's another port where c O two, mix of
(07:19):
c O two and other stuff could exit the suit.
And then you would have a scrubbing system consisting of
tanks holding a substance called lithium hydrox side and that
would do the job of scrubbing CEO two. You see,
c O two and lithium hydrox side have a chemical
reaction together that produces water and lithium carbonate, and it's
(07:39):
pretty darn good at it. You don't need a whole
lot of uh this, you know, lithium hydroxide to do
the job to remove a good amount of c O
two from space. So that's good from a space saving
and a weight saving standpoint. So a lot of space
suits and spacecraft use canisters of lithium hydroxide in or
(08:00):
to remove CEO two from the environment, and then the
water from that process can be used in other functions,
either like drinking water or an oxygen generator or even
you know, the water cooling system and the p l
s s would also connect through the suit using multiple
connectors so that everything could work in harmony with each other.
So obviously like the suit had connectors that docked with
(08:23):
the p LSS to allow the functions to go through.
For example, in order to have an effective cooling system,
you had to connect the water lines in the LCG suit,
which remember is underneath all these other layers with the
p l S S, and that meant that you had
to have these these special things built in so that
you had these connections without obviously making any weakness points
(08:46):
in the suit. So NASA developed special connectors that would
allow this to happen without causing a breach in the system.
Pretty ingenious really, to have everything hook up like this.
The suit and p L S S continued to evolve
over the course of the Apollomys, with later missions taking
advantage of lessons learned from the earlier ones, and sometimes
those plans had to change in the process. So, for example,
(09:10):
while the world marveled at the successful moon landing of
Apollo eleven, NASA was already planning ahead to create systems
that would allow for longer operation on the Moon, which
obviously necessitated more consideration for life support, and to that end,
they planned to make p L S S units that
could provide life support functions for longer durations. However, budget
(09:32):
constraints meant that some of those plans got cut that
couldn't afford to do all of them. What was to
be a larger secondary life support system got scrapped because
there just wasn't money in the budget to have that
so what takes its place. Well, it was what was
called a buddy life support system or b l s S,
(09:54):
and I bet you can figure out immediately what that means.
It would allow for someone who had a working life
support system to connect their suit directly to a second
astronaut who perhaps had a depleted or malfunctioning p LSS,
and then the two astronauts could then make their way
back to the spacecraft, where they would hook into the
(10:14):
spacecraft's life support system. It kind of makes me think
of drills in which two scuba divers would share the
same scuba tank between them in the event of one
scuba divers tank running out of oxygen or otherwise malfunctioning.
While astronauts on Apollo missions fourteen through seventeen had the
system available, fortunately there was never a need to actually
(10:38):
use it. So the buddy system existed, but no one
ever had to take advantage of it. It was kind
of they're just in case now. The last Apollo mission
of the actual Apollo program had the designation Apollo seventeen
and was in December of nineteen two. Following that, NASA
focused on the first American laboratory in orbit around Earth,
(11:01):
which had the name sky Lab, and in order to
get stuff, you know, to and from sky Lab, they
relied upon unused Apollo capsules And I'll have to do
a full episode about sky Lab in the future. But
the suits that astronauts wore while aboard sky Lab were
very similar to the ones that were using the final
(11:21):
three Apollo missions, called the A seven lb pressure suit.
The one that Neil Armstrong wore back in Apollo eleven
was the A seven L, so that one did not
have the B attached to it, and the Skylab version
had an extra thermal garment as part of the suit.
The lunar landing versions of the A seven lb allowed
(11:41):
for greater mobility and were designed so that astronauts could
conduct more extensive missions on the Moon's surface, including using
the lunar rover vehicle, So the suit had to have
greater flexibility than the older A seven L suits, including
additional joints built into the suits to allow astronauts to actually,
(12:02):
you know, sit on a rover and putter around on
the Moon's surface. It actually kind of makes me think
of action figures, like there were different types like g
I Joe action figures had joints at the elbow and knee,
so you could bend the arms and bend the legs.
As opposed to action figures from like the original Star
Wars action figures, they had no joints at the elbows
(12:23):
or knees, so they had very stiff armed and stiff
legged movements. Kind of similar to that. These joints were
made out of molded rubber, kind of like a like
a bellows almost, and you could find them at the shoulders,
the elbows, the hips, and the knees. The p l
s s could supply up to seven hours of life
support towards the end of the Apollo program, allowing for
(12:45):
pretty extensive e v A s. The versions worn inside
the spacecraft and the type Warren and sky Lab were
not quite as fancy as the lunar versions. NASA chose
to go with a design for sky Lab that would
require astronaut to actually be tethered to the Skylab facility
for life support functions during any sort of e v A,
(13:06):
so you had that umbilical back to the spacecraft if
you were doing an e v A at sky Lab
instead of carrying you know, your own portable life support unit.
This necessitated a redesign of the front of the suit
in order to accommodate the umbilical tether in a way
that wouldn't get in the in the way of the astronaut. Right,
so you think about it, if you have a hose
(13:27):
connected to your chest, you wanted to be in a
spot where it's not going to get in the way
of your arms if you have to do intricate work
on say a spacecraft. Um, so, yeah, this was a
bit of a redesign, and the astronauts would connect the
other end of the tether to a life support panel
inside the airlock of Skylab before depressurization. And while you
(13:48):
could have more than one astronaut go on an e
v A at once at sky Lab, typically they would
each connect to their own panel as opposed to sharing
a panel. The panel had multiple out puts, so you
could connect more than one tether to a panel, but
generally speaking, that's not how the astronauts operated. The astronauts
(14:08):
did have a half hour supply of pure oxygen on
their suit, just as an emergency backup if for some
reason the life support connection to the spacecraft had failed.
The suits had a few other differences from the Apollo versions.
For one, they had more zippers to allow for easier
dawning and daffing of the suits and zero g uh.
(14:29):
That did come at the cost of some mobility, but
since the Skylab astronauts wouldn't be going on joy rides
on the lunar rover, it didn't matter as much to
NASA that they wouldn't be able to, you know, like
bend at the waist. They also had fewer layers of
thermal protection than the Apollo suits. They were using slightly
different materials in a new arrangement that still provided thermal protection,
(14:51):
so it's not like they got rid of it, they
just found a more efficient way of doing it without
needing as many layers of material. There were only three
crew as in a cruise people going on them. Skyline
missions are only three they had astronauts actually go to
sky Lab, with the first one in May nineteen seventy three.
The last one happened in November nineteen seventy three to
(15:12):
February nineteen seventy four. Nine astronauts would visit the sky
Lab Across all three of these missions, divided up between
the three. That is, so three astronauts per mission Across
these three missions, astronauts spent a total of a hundred
seventy one days aboard sky Lab. The longest of the
three missions was for eighty four days. The cruise traveled
(15:36):
to and from Skylab. As I said, with repurposed Apollo
command modules on repurposed launch vehicles that you know, we're
meant for the Apollo program. But the Apollo program ended
and they still had these, so they're like, well, let's
use them, um, and so the Apollo capsule, the command
capsule would dock at one end of the sky Lab. Clearly,
(15:56):
they didn't have the lunar module, there was no need
for that, so that part was not attached to the spacecraft. Interestingly,
the living quarters of sky Lab were palatial compared to
the Apollo capsule. Astronauts actually, we're using a converted fuel
tank of a Saturn S for b rocket stage to
act as their living quarters, which meant that they had
(16:18):
an internal space of twelve thousand, seven hundred fifty cubic
feet or three hundred sixty one cubic meters of space.
The Apollo capsule was just two hundred eighteen cubic feet
or six point one seven cubic meters, so an enormous difference.
I imagine that when it came time to, you know,
use the bathroom, it was a lot easier to get
(16:39):
some space between you and the other astronauts. After that,
the Soviets were the only people sending crews up into
space using the Soyuz capsule. In nine, the Soviet Union
and America conducted some joint missions, with the Soviets in
a Soyuz capsule and the Americans were in the final
Apollo capsule and the two spacecraft docked with each other
(17:02):
in orbit. The two crews worked together on several experiments
before the spacecraft separated and they both returned to Earth safely.
So this was the Apollo Soyu's mission, not officially part
of the Apollo program, but using the final Apollo capsule,
and then the United States kind of hit a dry spell.
The Soviets continued to launch Soyu's capsules into space, working
(17:25):
on small Soviet space stations under the name Salute, but
for the USA the crude missions would be on hold
until the Space Shuttle was ready to launch, which had
a few delays. It was finally ready in ninety one.
NASA had hoped to use the Shuttle to help boost
sky Lab into a higher orbit and keep Skylab going.
(17:46):
But because of the delays in the Space Shuttle program,
that opportunity went away. Uh sky Labs orbit deteriorated, and
then it broke apart upon re entering the air's atmosphere
in nine so there was no way of prolonging that mission.
But now we're getting into the next era of space suits,
the Space Shuttle era. When we come back, we'll talk
(18:07):
about how those suits worked and what was different from
the Apollo era suits. But first let's take this quick break.
The Space Shuttle era does not have a single suit
that we can point to and say this is what
Space Shuttle suits were like. There are actually a few
(18:30):
different ones, and of course there's a difference between the
suits that were worn inside the Space Shuttle for normal
operations as opposed for the stuff like take off and landing,
and then the stuff worn for e v A S
or extra vehicular activities you know, going out into space.
But let's start at the beginning. The first mission, STS one,
(18:53):
which launched on April twel had two astronauts wearing suits
that were based largely on an Air Force flight suit
designated S ten thirty. These were worn by pilots aboard
the s R seventy one Blackbird aircraft. That's a long range,
high speed, and high altitude reconnaissance vehicle. I've actually talked
(19:15):
about the Blackbird in other episodes of tech Stuff. The
David Clark Company, long associated with flight and space suits,
made the variation for the early Space Shuttle cruise, and
this one became known as the S ten thirty A,
also known as the Shuttle Ejection Escape Suit. Now, as
that name suggests, the suit was intended to protect astronauts
(19:37):
in the event of an emergency ejection, and they were
rated to protect an astronaut up to an altitude of
eighty thousand feet and the speed of mock two point seven,
which is a big yalza. So let's talk about that
for a second to get our minds wrapped around what
this means. So, as you climb in the atmosphere, the
(19:58):
air pressure drops, which makes sense, right after all, on
the ground, you've got the pressure of all that atmosphere
pressing down on you. But as you go higher, you
have less atmosphere above you, and so there's less pressure
pushing down on you. At eighty thousand feet, the air
pressure is point four zero six pounds per square inch.
(20:19):
Temperature is a bit fiddly when it comes to altitudes.
The temperature drops off as you climb up to a point,
but then as you hit the stratosphere, the temperature actually
starts to go up as you climb, and then as
you get beyond the stratosphere, the temperature plunges again no joke,
But at any thousand feet you're looking at temperatures of
(20:40):
nearly negative sixty two Fahrenheits, So the suit has to
protect against both the low pressure and the low temperature.
Now let's talk about mock two point seven. Some folks
reduce mock to mean a multiple of the speed of sound,
so if you're going mock three, you're going three times
the speed of sound, which is only part of the picture,
(21:01):
because the actual explanation of mock is more complicated. And
part of that is because the nature of the speed
of sound is more complicated because sound travels at a
speed that's dependent upon the medium through which it travels. So,
in other words, sound travels at different speeds at different conditions,
and those conditions can include things like temperature, so it
(21:25):
will travel at different speed at sea level at standard
temperature than it will at eight feet. So mock actually
describes the ratio of the flow velocity of some fluid
like air compared to the speed of sound through that
particular medium. For shorthand, you could say it's like a multiplier.
(21:46):
You know, you could say, oh, it's multiplied by the
speed of sound. But just know that when you really
dig down, it gets a little more complicated than that. Now,
your typical commercial aircraft travels at a speed of around
mock zero point eight, So mock two point seven is
wicked fast. It's kind of like around you know, more
than two thousand miles per hour or approximately three thousand,
(22:09):
three hundred thirty four kilometers per hour. So the suit
needed to protect astronauts against the forces they would encounter
should they have to eject at that speed, which is
pretty crazy stuff. Now, this version of the Space Shuttle
had ejection seats for the pilot and copilot, and as
they said, those early Shuttle flights only had two astronauts
(22:30):
each to make certain that the shuttle was operating at
the expected levels and testing it out to make certain
it could go into operational status. Now, keep in mind.
The purpose of the Shuttle was to serve as a
reusable vehicle that we could take to low Earth orbit
and then come back to Earth. So the injector seats
and the escape suits or standard issue for STS one
(22:51):
through STS four, the first four test missions of the
Space Shuttle UH Space Shuttle Columbia. I should add the
suits would connect to the shuttle for the purposes of
life support. And if you ever look at a photo
of an astronaut wearing one of these, you'd say that
is non attractive space suit because they kind of look
(23:12):
like lumpy potatoes. They weren't designed for use outside the
shuttle in space, so they lacked the various layers of
thermal protection and teflon coding and whatnot to protect against
like micro meteoroids and the extremes of temperature that you
would find in outer space. There would be no need
to worry about that stuff until a bit later with
(23:32):
the first Shuttle based e v A s. The pressure
suits did have bladders in the legs, so they were
partially pressurized. They're pressurized in the lower body, and again
this was to provide the pressure needed to keep blood
from pooling in the lower extremities during times of extreme acceleration.
So this helps protect against blackouts. Right, if all your
(23:54):
blood starts rushing to the lower part of your your body,
then there's not enough in your brain to keep you,
you know, conscious. So this pressure helped prevent against that.
It helped kind of put enough pressure on the lower
limbs so that blood couldn't pool down in the lower body.
I talked about it a bit in our previous episodes.
After the first four test flight missions of the Space Shuttle,
(24:16):
NASA made a few changes, and for one thing, they
got rid of the ejection seats in the Shuttle, which
meant that the suits really weren't a fit anymore either,
because the whole reason to have the suits was as
a protective outfit in the event of having to eject
out of the Shuttle, so they got rid of them
starting with STS five, the fifth flight of the Space
(24:38):
Shuttle Columbia and the first operational flight, meaning the first
to actually be considered more than a test flight. This
was one that was delivering a payload to outer space.
The cruise on that vessel didn't wear pressurized suits during
takeoff and landing or launch and re entry. Slash landing.
They had simple flight suit. They were blue in color,
(25:01):
They weren't pressurized. They did have helmets to protect their
noggins for launch and re entry and landing, but they
weren't wearing any sort of pressurized suit with life support.
NASA was sort of following the old Soviet model, which
for many years did not have cosmonauts wearing pressurized suits
until there was this tragic decompression accident that changed things.
As it turns out, a similar tragedy would change NASA's
(25:24):
approach a few years later. Now, I don't really have
much to say about the blue flight suits because they
didn't really represent a lot of tech, and really they
showed that NASA had a high level of confidence in
the safety and operation of the Shuttle. But I can
talk about the new extra vehicular Activity or e v
A space suits. NASA planned to have two astronauts go
(25:47):
on a spacewalk during STS five, but some health issues
delayed that, and then a technical error in one of
the suits put those plans on ice until STS six,
the sixth mission that would end up being the maiden
flight of the Shuttle Challenger. And yeah, both Columbia and
Challenger have tragic ends, but STS six was a success,
(26:10):
and during that mission, astronauts put the new extra vehicular
Mobility Unit or EMU to the test. Let's talk about those.
So one big change with the e m U or
EMU was what was worn underneath it, specifically the mag
or MG that stands for maximum absorbancy garment. And if
(26:33):
you think that sounds like a diaper, it depends. Now
you're on the right track. Gone were the days of
the urine collection devices because those were meant to work
with male astronauts and the space program had finally evolved
beyond being a men only endeavor. After this, you know garment,
(26:54):
you would slide on a one piece thermal garment called
the Thermal Control undergarment. It's kind like a body suit
or long John's. And then came the Liquid Cooling and
Ventilation Garment or l c VG, similar to the one
that was worn by Apollo astronauts. This is the thing
that allows cool water to run through tubes that are
(27:15):
against the garment and help, you know, maintain a good
body temperature for the astronaut. The suit had a few
other pieces to it. The two big ones were the
lower torso assembly or l t A, and then you
had the hard upper torso or h U T hut
so as the name implies, the hard upper torso. First
(27:38):
of all, it was for the upper torso so like
the chest and shoulders and stomach even and it had
a rigid body structure made out of fiberglass which could
hold in the pressure of the suit and not have
it balloon outward. So instead of using like a tough,
tight material to restrain ballooning, this was just a you know,
a hard material. It didn't flex in all. UH the
(28:02):
arms of the suit, the helmet, and the lower torso
assembly all would connect to the h UT, as did
the p l SS UH, the primary life support system
officially known as that now, and the display controls module
would also mount on the front. This is the sort
of Darth Vader looking collection of UH indicators and and controls. Also,
(28:25):
the HUT would hold a bag filled with drinkable liquid
with a straw that would extend up to the helmet
of the astronaut, because even in space it's important to
stay hydrated. Ultimately, NASA only produced three sizes of the HUT,
which meant, in turn that the organization had a limited
number of choices when it came to which astronauts would
(28:46):
be able to go on e v A s, because
the suit was not a one size fits all kind
of deal, nor was NASA planning on custom building a
suit for every astronaut. The exterior of the EMU is
bright white, part to reflect heat and partly so that
the astronaut is extremely visible against the blackness of space.
And in total, the suit has fourteen layers, from the
(29:09):
liquid cooling layers are closest to the astronaut skin, to
a pressure suit layer, to a restraint layer to keep
that pressure in check, to a neopreen layer to hold
everything in, to seven layers of micro meteoroid and thermal
protective material, and an outer layer of kevlar nomes and gortex. Alright,
(29:31):
so an astronaut going on a n e v A
would first put on their you know there under suit,
but then they would put on the l t A
the lower half of this suit, the leggings and boots
and you know stuff that comes up to the hips essentially,
and this half is the soft half. It's the pliable
half at least when it's not pressurized. And then they
(29:53):
would put on the hut, the upper half and seal
those two together. They lock in together and have a
ceiling layer that was used necessary obviously you want to
keep a seal airtight. Then they would put on their
snoopy cap. This is a close fitting head covering that
incorporates speakers and a microphone that allows for communications with others.
(30:13):
Then they would seal on the gloves and helmet. Then
the suit would pressure eye, the p L S S
would activate, and then you would have your astronaut ready
to go. Not only took around fifteen minutes to get
into or out of the suit from beginning to end,
but the process of going on an e V A
would require a lot more prep work than just getting
(30:33):
into gear. Like you had the whole pre breathe exercise
you had to do too, alright, So connecting the p
L S S to the suit, there was another element
on the e M you called the electrical harness or
e e H or EMU electrical harness. This was worn
inside the suit, but with connections to link the p
L S S to the stuit itself, so all the
(30:55):
systems would be interconnected. The helmet had various visors to
protect against stuff like sunlight. It also had mounted headlamps
and could accommodate a TV camera transmitter as well, so
that you could get that glorious first person astronaut view.
While the David Clark Company made the pressurized suits for
the early test flights of the Space Shuttle, the e
(31:16):
m U was the product of two other companies. One
was Hamilton's Standard and the other was I L C. Dover.
And while the first real use of the e MU
was aboard the STS six after the failed attempt on
STS five, I should also add that they actually had
one of these suits on STS four during one of
the test flights, and they practiced the process of putting
(31:40):
the suit on and taking it off in zero G
to make sure that there weren't any other issues that
need to be worked out. They didn't take it on
a n E v A, they didn't leave the shuttle,
but they did practice getting into and out of it.
The e MU design would evolve a little bit over
the years, but to this day there are still e
m U s aboard the Internet Space Station. And when
(32:01):
you think about that, like how old these things are,
that's something right. The ones they're actually have a little
bit more of a modular design, which gives astronauts the
ability to change the fitting slightly, which helps them accommodate
different body sizes and types. At least to an extent,
the hut still kind of limits things a bit in
that regard. I should also mention that these things are
(32:24):
pretty heavy, at least back here on Earth. They're heavy
in space. You don't really have to worry about it. Wait,
it's not so much a thing you gotta worry when
you're in, you know, a microgravity environment. But if you
were to suit up down here, you probably wouldn't be
going on any sprints or anything like that. That's because
the Shuttle version of the e v A weighed in
and around two pounds, around a little less than a hundreds,
(32:47):
and the version that would be worn aboard the I
S S was even heftier. That was three nineteen pounds
or around a hundred. One other thing I want to
cover before we go to break is the m m
YOU or manned maneuvering unit. This was a propulsion unit
that fit over the life support system that you wore
(33:07):
on your back when you were in an e m U.
This was kind of like a jet pack for space,
although not using you know, thrusters with ignited fuel instead
using nitrogen gas as a propellant. And there were twenty
four nozzles on the m m U, so you could
use the combination of nozzles to kind of maneuver your
(33:28):
way and float through space with this backpack and not
have any other connection to the spacecraft, like no teather,
just floating around out there. Uh. You would use a
hand controls on the MMU to kind of guide where
you wanted to go. Bruce McCandless did this Ino, and
there's a famous photo of him looking back at the
(33:49):
Shuttle with nothing connecting him to the spacecraft as he
just floats above the Earth. And if I think about
it too much while I'm looking at that picture, I
actually start to feel anxiety. Is an incredible photo. The
MMU was used on only three missions before NASA retired it,
and the reason the agency sunseted the MMU was the
(34:10):
same reason that the Blue jumpsuit era would come to
an end. It would be a disaster that would change everything,
but we'll talk about that after this quick break. On
January nine, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart seventy three
(34:33):
seconds after launch, killing all aboard This was one of
those big defining moments in history, history in general, not
just the space industry. For one thing, as a launch,
multiple news outlets were covering the story live in real time,
and so the world saw this explosion happen. For another,
(34:57):
NASA had really promoted this mission heavily, part because a
high school teacher, Krista, she was part of the crew
and she would have been the first teacher in space.
And for that reason, it was something a lot of
schools were showing live on on televisions. In the whole
generation of school kids were exposed to this tragic disaster
(35:19):
in real time. And I mean I was one of them.
I was ten when it happened. I could do a
full episode about that mission and what happened as a
result of that disaster, But for our purposes, let's just
stick to the suits. NASA grounded the Space Shuttle program
(35:39):
and conducted a full investigation and evaluation of the program.
No Space Shuttle missions flew for two years and eight months,
and when the program returned, so did pressurized flight suits.
Astronauts had to wear these suits for launch and for
re entry and landing, so once again they had to
wear a specific suit for those moments in a mission.
(36:02):
They were officially called the launch entry suit. These new
suits would get the nickname pumpkin suits because they were
bright orange in color, and the thinking was that in
an emergency evacuation, they would likely be over water and
the bright orange color would make the suits really easy
to spot against the ocean. The suits had partial pressurization,
(36:25):
they were not fully pressurized, so again around the legs
to prevent blackouts. So similar to the ejection suits that
were worn in the test flights of the Space Shell
for Sts one through four, the gloves for the suits
would actually just zipper onto the suits themselves. They did
not have like the ring locking mechanism that other suits did.
(36:49):
They came with a helmet with a polycarbonate face plate
that could seal onto the neck of the suit. The
astronauts also wore heavy duty boots in addition to the suit,
and they had a survival backpack which included stuff like
a parachute and a life raft, among some other things.
As space suits go, this one kind of sat between
the emergency ejection suits of the early Shuttle tests and
(37:10):
the jumpsuit that astronauts wore up to the Challenger disaster.
They were kind of smacked out in the middle. These
suits remained in use until the mid nineties, when NASA
would replace them with the Advanced Crew Escape Suit or
ACES a c S. These are also called pumpkin suits
they also because they're bright orange, but they are puffier
(37:31):
than the ELIS suits that came before them, so unlike
the l E S the ACES suits for the later
spatial era, they were in our full pressure suits. They
aren't just partially pressurized, so rather than having zippered connections
for the gloves, the gloves lock on through lock rings,
much like E m U suits do. They also include
(37:53):
a liquid cooling mechanism to help with body temperature, so
we're back to that as well, and the ACES suit
has a detachable helmet and also comes complete with a
survival backpack, similar to the l E S. Like the
l E S, astronauts would wear the ACES suit during
launch and re entry and landing. It's very similar to
the so Cool suits that the Russians use. Uh the
(38:15):
Russians suit helmet is permanently attached to the suit, and
there's no backpack on the so called suits because there's
not enough room in a Soyuz capsule to handle one.
But these are the suits that have been in use
long after the Shuttle program has come to an end.
And now let's talk a little bit about some planned suits,
(38:35):
including a couple that never entered into service. One of
those was the Constellation space suits. I shouldn't say one
two of them were Constellation space suits because there were
two different versions. So the Constellation project was meant to
pick up where the Space Shuttle was leaving off, with
the idea being that the new spacecraft would take astronauts
(38:56):
to and from the International Space Station and ultimately to
the Moon, hopefully by twenty twenty. This would be the
Orion spacecraft. And if you are paying attention, you know
that came and went and no one was going to
the moon. Well, the Constellation program ultimately got the acts
after a full review of the program revealed that it
(39:16):
would be unsuccessful without a substantial increase in the budget.
But had it gone ahead, we would have seen a
new type of space suit meant to be worn both
during critical maneuvers such as during launch and reentry, as
well as for e v A s. So, in other words,
astronauts would have an indoor outdoor space suit, and there
(39:37):
were two planned configurations of this suit. Configuration one would
have covered most missions with a full pressure suit that
included a closed loop environmental system allowing for operation in space,
and like some of the older suits I've talked about,
this one would connect to the Orion spacecraft's life support
system through an umbilical tether rather than incorporating its own
(39:59):
p L s US. The second configuration was planned for
lunar missions. This was more of a heavy duty one.
The suit would make use of the same arms, legs, boots, helmet,
and gloves as Configuration one's suit, but to have a
different torso section. It would also allow for higher pressure
within the suit, something that could head off issues like
(40:20):
decompression sickness, which I mentioned about earlier, the bends, that
kind of thing. While the US discontinued the Constellation program
in two, NASA continued to develop the Constellation space suit,
but simultaneously, a different department within NASA was working on
the Advanced Space Suit project. So you had two different
(40:40):
space suit programs working at the same time. Let's talk
about this Advanced Space Suit Project one. The initiative developed
two designs for e v A suits. The Z one
and the Z two. The Z one uses a soft
suit approach, meaning you know, it's mostly pliable when it's
not pressurized. It has some hard components, but it's mostly fabric.
(41:02):
Has a large dome shaped helmet attached to the suit.
Kind of looks like buzz Lightyear. In fact, the white
suit has like some green lines on it and all
the pictures of it, so it really does look like
a buzz light ear suit. And it splits into upper
and lower torso segments as well as having assembly mechanisms
for gloves and boots to attach to the suit. The
(41:23):
Z two has a hard upper torso rather than a
soft one, so it's similar to the E m U
suit I mentioned earlier. In addition to the Z one
and Z two, the projects spawned an updated p l SS.
This one was called the Next Generation Life Support where
in g l S complete with an improved method for
removing carbon dioxide phone the suit's air supply. In sixteen,
(41:46):
NASA made the decision to combine the information that had
been learned from the Constellation project as well as the
Advanced Space Suit Project and create a new one kind
of like Vultron. All this joining together to find the
x e m U project ZIMU, I guess or x
AMU if you prefer uh. This is the specific project
(42:08):
that the audit found to be behind schedule, to the
point that the Artemis programming, which we were supposed to
go back to the Moon by twenty four is not
going to happen at least not on that timetable. In fact,
according to the report, these suits will not be ready
until April at the earliest. That's if everything goes right.
(42:28):
The report on those suits is available online and it
is heck and thorough, y'all. In that report, we learned
that the Constellation suit program cost a hundred thirty five
points seven million bucks before it came to an end,
the Advanced Space Suit pro project that costs another fifty
one point six million dollars, and the x EMU has
(42:49):
cost so far around two hundred thirty two point eight
million dollars. I did the math, and that means that
NASA has spent more than four hundred twenty million dollars
on the next generation of space suits already four twenty
NASA is just blazing through that cash, and according to
the report, it's not even halfway to what will ultimately
(43:10):
get spent on these suits before they are fully built,
tested and deployed. Yeza. Still, when you're talking about keeping
people alive in space, it's obviously it's gonna cost a
lot of money. But what happened, well, that's complicated. So
one bit is that there are multiple offices or departments
within NASA responsible for space suit development. They aren't always
(43:33):
working on the same projects or with each other, so
you've got a lot of overlap. Potentially you've got a
lot of potential wasted effort because it's not a unified approach.
This doesn't mean that it's always a bad thing, because
you can often get really good ideas coming out of
totally different groups that would would have died on the
vine if it had been a unified project. But it
(43:55):
does make it more complicated. So like this is like
when NASA side that the Constellation program and the Advanced
Space Suit program needed to kind of combine into each other.
For another. As I mentioned before, NASA is an organization
that sees a lot of changes every year. For one thing,
there's always a political battle over NASA's funding. Any agency
(44:17):
that's dependent upon federal funds is going to find it
hard to stay on track because support can fluctuate from
year to year. You might get a year where you
get more financial support and another year where no one
is really supporting you, and that makes it really hard
to stay on task with projects. For another, the head
of NASA gets their position courtesy of whomever happens to
(44:38):
be president, so that means leadership and NASA changes fairly regularly,
and that can mean projects that were in progress might
end up being put on the back shelf or even
getting the acts. NASA, I want to add, is an
incredible agency. There are countless people devoted to the pursuit
of science and knowledge who are working there. They are innovating,
(45:01):
they're solving problems that are really spectacular problems. But they
also have to work in a system that isn't always
dependable or stable. Right like, things change, priorities change, leadership changes,
and this sometimes means that something that was in development
gets taken off development. And when you add to that
(45:23):
the normal challenges of just trying to create technology with
all the designing and testing and then the redesigning and
rebuilding and retesting and all of that effort, particularly for
technology that's meant to help keep people alive in an
environment that is trying to kill you, and you can
see why there are issues. My hope is that we
will see the x E m U suits emerge. We
(45:46):
need them, the I S S needs them, and there
are some cool things that they're supposed to incorporate. Now.
I'm holding off on going into detail about all that because,
as we've seen, sometimes stuff that we plan for just
doesn't pan out, like a feature that was considered to
be critical ends up getting cut. So I don't want
to cover all the things that are planned for it.
(46:06):
I want to wait to see what happens. But believe me,
if we get to a point where we've got a
working x E m U suit ready to go into service,
I will come back to this topic and we will
do a full episode on it, and that ends our
journey about the evolution of space suits. So far, I
didn't really cover the private space suits sector. I might
do that in a future episode at some point. Um
(46:28):
It's one that I have mixed feelings about because I
often feel that people like Elon musk Um dismiss how
hard this is to do safely and properly. But on
the other hand, there is something to be said about
having the entire process under the control of a single company.
So there are advantages to the private space approach that
(46:51):
a federally funded agency like NASA cannot take advantage of.
That that much is true. I just don't know that
musk boasting that he could get it done through SpaceX
and take care of NASA's space suit problem is really
that accurate. But who am I to say maybe they'll
be able to do it. We'll have to wait and see,
(47:13):
and that's it. If you have suggestions for topics I
should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's
a company, technology, a trend in tech. Maybe it's just
something you want to know more about, let me know
on Twitter the handle for the show it's tech Stuff
h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(47:36):
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host
job than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio
and I love all Things sech And we are continuing
our series about space suits and their evolution. So the
(00:25):
last episode we really focused on the suits used in
the Apollo missions. We also talked a lot about pooping
in space, which I felt was necessary to talk about.
It's also necessary to do sometimes, and those Apollo space
which actually did change a bit over time. I'll talk
a little bit about that in this episode, because the
suits that were used in the final missions were a
(00:47):
little different from the earlier ones, but overall they were
mostly kept to the same design once you got to
the block to Apollo missions after the canceled Block one design.
And now we're going to talk a bit about the
p l s S, which, depending upon what source you're reading,
either stands for portable life support system or primary life
(01:10):
support system, but in the case of Apollo, it really
means the backpack. This is the life support system that
attached to the suit and allowed astronauts like Neil Armstrong
to you know, gallivan around on the Moon without being
connected by a life support umbilical tether to you know,
like the lunar module. The p l S S would
(01:31):
provide the pressurization needed inside the suit as well as
the oxygen that the astronauts breathe. The ability to scrub
c O two from the suit also very important, and
it also acted as a cooling system to help with
temperature control with the water cooling. So in addition, astronauts
on the Moon also had an Oxygen Purge System or OPS,
(01:54):
which stood in as an emergency backup should the p
l s S fail. So while it's as oxygen purge
system and it makes it sound like you're getting rid
of all your oxygen, it was a secondary oxygen source,
but it only gave the astronauts really enough time to
be able to return to the lunar module and then
connect their suits back to the module's life support system
(02:16):
if things really went you know, pear shaped. The p
L S S started off in development in nineteen six one,
nearly a decade before one would be used on the Moon,
and that was necessary because we were learning so much
about what would be needed in order to make a
Moon mission successful. So while development was begun back then,
(02:38):
a lot of the stuff we learned would mean we'd
have to change designs. For one thing, engineers learned that
the metabolic requirements to get stuff done in space were
really way higher than what was initially estimated, which meant
astronauts were having to put forth a lot more effort
than was originally guessed, and that meant that the life
(02:59):
support says STEMS would need to keep up with that
in order to supply the necessary oxygen and keep the
astronauts body temperature at an acceptable level. But how do
you cool off the water circulating through the suit. If
you remember, a an inner layer of the suit had
plastic tubes essentially through which water would run and carry
(03:21):
body heat away. Well, you've got to get rid of
that heat, right, you have to have some sort of
heat exchange in order for the water to cool down again.
Otherwise eventually you're just going to be running body temperature
level water or hotter through the suit, and that doesn't
help you with maintaining a right temperature. Well, in this case,
(03:42):
the answer ended up being a plate that to the
naked eye seemed like it was a solid plate, but
in fact it had microscopic pours in that plate, so
warm water from the cooling system would fill up those
pores just a little bit, not a whole lot of water,
and then it would just boil off into space. And
because boiling is an endothermic reaction, it actually carried heat
(04:06):
away from the system, and that would cool the water
that remained, uh, and some of that water would just
freeze in those pores, effectively sealing the pores. But then
this water would get warmed by the cooling system or
the gas circulating system, and the process would repeat itself,
and it would continuously cool as long as you had
(04:28):
enough water running in the system, and you weren't losing
a ton of it, you know, all at once or anything.
It was little bits, so it could run for a
while before being depleted. The invention would end up being
used in many future space technologies, including the International Space Station,
so not just for space suits. Now, I mentioned that
the p LSS had an oxygen supply, which is obviously
(04:51):
a necessary component for a life support system for a
human being, and this was pure oxygen as opposed to
the mix of gases that we breathe here on Earth.
A typical lungfull down here on the planet is nitrogen
twenty one oxygen and then everything else like argonne, carbon dioxide,
(05:12):
and some trace elements. All of that is less than
a percentage point each. However, in a low pressure environment,
going with this kind of mixture could lead to a
dangerous situation in which you don't have enough of a
concentration of O two in the astronauts lungs and their blood.
(05:34):
So most space life support systems actually rely on a
supply of pure oxygen instead. Oh an interesting fact, the
Space Shuttle and the International Space Station have or you know,
in the case of the Space Shuttle had internal atmospheres
that mirrored Earth's atmospheres, and for that reason, astronauts dawning
(05:54):
spacesuits for a n e v A first had to
engage in a bit of pre breathe the activity, which
is somewhat confusing, right, I mean, it's a weird thing
to say, but what it means is that they had
to strap on a mask and breathe pure oxygen for
like a period of like four hours in some cases
before getting into the space suit and relying on the
(06:17):
spacesuits life support system. And the whole reason for doing
that was to have a gradual process to remove nitrogen
from the astronauts blood, which in turn would reduce the
chance that the astronaut would get the bends once heading
into the low pressure environment of outer space, just like
you would see with someone who is you know, deep
sea diving. All right, tangent over, let's get back to
(06:38):
the p l s S. Well, it turns out that
we humans, you know, we breathe an oxygen and we
breathe out carbon dioxide among some other stuff. It's not
just pure CEO two. And if we have a significant
build up of c O two in our environment, and
by significant I mean if CEO two levels rise up
to be about eight percent of what we're breathing, well
(06:58):
we can't breathe proper. Really it actually it becomes toxic,
and obviously that's a problem, potentially a deadly one. So
there had to be a way to remove c O
two from the suit. So you can think of it
as there being one port into which pure oxygen flows in,
and there's another port where c O two, mix of
(07:19):
c O two and other stuff could exit the suit.
And then you would have a scrubbing system consisting of
tanks holding a substance called lithium hydrox side and that
would do the job of scrubbing CEO two. You see,
c O two and lithium hydrox side have a chemical
reaction together that produces water and lithium carbonate, and it's
(07:39):
pretty darn good at it. You don't need a whole
lot of uh this, you know, lithium hydroxide to do
the job to remove a good amount of c O
two from space. So that's good from a space saving
and a weight saving standpoint. So a lot of space
suits and spacecraft use canisters of lithium hydroxide in or
(08:00):
to remove CEO two from the environment, and then the
water from that process can be used in other functions,
either like drinking water or an oxygen generator or even
you know, the water cooling system and the p l
s s would also connect through the suit using multiple
connectors so that everything could work in harmony with each other.
So obviously like the suit had connectors that docked with
(08:23):
the p LSS to allow the functions to go through.
For example, in order to have an effective cooling system,
you had to connect the water lines in the LCG suit,
which remember is underneath all these other layers with the
p l S S, and that meant that you had
to have these these special things built in so that
you had these connections without obviously making any weakness points
(08:46):
in the suit. So NASA developed special connectors that would
allow this to happen without causing a breach in the system.
Pretty ingenious really, to have everything hook up like this.
The suit and p L S S continued to evolve
over the course of the Apollomys, with later missions taking
advantage of lessons learned from the earlier ones, and sometimes
those plans had to change in the process. So, for example,
(09:10):
while the world marveled at the successful moon landing of
Apollo eleven, NASA was already planning ahead to create systems
that would allow for longer operation on the Moon, which
obviously necessitated more consideration for life support, and to that end,
they planned to make p L S S units that
could provide life support functions for longer durations. However, budget
(09:32):
constraints meant that some of those plans got cut that
couldn't afford to do all of them. What was to
be a larger secondary life support system got scrapped because
there just wasn't money in the budget to have that
so what takes its place. Well, it was what was
called a buddy life support system or b l s S,
(09:54):
and I bet you can figure out immediately what that means.
It would allow for someone who had a working life
support system to connect their suit directly to a second
astronaut who perhaps had a depleted or malfunctioning p LSS,
and then the two astronauts could then make their way
back to the spacecraft, where they would hook into the
(10:14):
spacecraft's life support system. It kind of makes me think
of drills in which two scuba divers would share the
same scuba tank between them in the event of one
scuba divers tank running out of oxygen or otherwise malfunctioning.
While astronauts on Apollo missions fourteen through seventeen had the
system available, fortunately there was never a need to actually
(10:38):
use it. So the buddy system existed, but no one
ever had to take advantage of it. It was kind
of they're just in case now. The last Apollo mission
of the actual Apollo program had the designation Apollo seventeen
and was in December of nineteen two. Following that, NASA
focused on the first American laboratory in orbit around Earth,
(11:01):
which had the name sky Lab, and in order to
get stuff, you know, to and from sky Lab, they
relied upon unused Apollo capsules And I'll have to do
a full episode about sky Lab in the future. But
the suits that astronauts wore while aboard sky Lab were
very similar to the ones that were using the final
(11:21):
three Apollo missions, called the A seven lb pressure suit.
The one that Neil Armstrong wore back in Apollo eleven
was the A seven L, so that one did not
have the B attached to it, and the Skylab version
had an extra thermal garment as part of the suit.
The lunar landing versions of the A seven lb allowed
(11:41):
for greater mobility and were designed so that astronauts could
conduct more extensive missions on the Moon's surface, including using
the lunar rover vehicle, So the suit had to have
greater flexibility than the older A seven L suits, including
additional joints built into the suits to allow astronauts to actually,
(12:02):
you know, sit on a rover and putter around on
the Moon's surface. It actually kind of makes me think
of action figures, like there were different types like g
I Joe action figures had joints at the elbow and knee,
so you could bend the arms and bend the legs.
As opposed to action figures from like the original Star
Wars action figures, they had no joints at the elbows
(12:23):
or knees, so they had very stiff armed and stiff
legged movements. Kind of similar to that. These joints were
made out of molded rubber, kind of like a like
a bellows almost, and you could find them at the shoulders,
the elbows, the hips, and the knees. The p l
s s could supply up to seven hours of life
support towards the end of the Apollo program, allowing for
(12:45):
pretty extensive e v A s. The versions worn inside
the spacecraft and the type Warren and sky Lab were
not quite as fancy as the lunar versions. NASA chose
to go with a design for sky Lab that would
require astronaut to actually be tethered to the Skylab facility
for life support functions during any sort of e v A,
(13:06):
so you had that umbilical back to the spacecraft if
you were doing an e v A at sky Lab
instead of carrying you know, your own portable life support unit.
This necessitated a redesign of the front of the suit
in order to accommodate the umbilical tether in a way
that wouldn't get in the in the way of the astronaut. Right,
so you think about it, if you have a hose
(13:27):
connected to your chest, you wanted to be in a
spot where it's not going to get in the way
of your arms if you have to do intricate work
on say a spacecraft. Um, so, yeah, this was a
bit of a redesign, and the astronauts would connect the
other end of the tether to a life support panel
inside the airlock of Skylab before depressurization. And while you
(13:48):
could have more than one astronaut go on an e
v A at once at sky Lab, typically they would
each connect to their own panel as opposed to sharing
a panel. The panel had multiple out puts, so you
could connect more than one tether to a panel, but
generally speaking, that's not how the astronauts operated. The astronauts
(14:08):
did have a half hour supply of pure oxygen on
their suit, just as an emergency backup if for some
reason the life support connection to the spacecraft had failed.
The suits had a few other differences from the Apollo versions.
For one, they had more zippers to allow for easier
dawning and daffing of the suits and zero g uh.
(14:29):
That did come at the cost of some mobility, but
since the Skylab astronauts wouldn't be going on joy rides
on the lunar rover, it didn't matter as much to
NASA that they wouldn't be able to, you know, like
bend at the waist. They also had fewer layers of
thermal protection than the Apollo suits. They were using slightly
different materials in a new arrangement that still provided thermal protection,
(14:51):
so it's not like they got rid of it, they
just found a more efficient way of doing it without
needing as many layers of material. There were only three
crew as in a cruise people going on them. Skyline
missions are only three they had astronauts actually go to
sky Lab, with the first one in May nineteen seventy three.
The last one happened in November nineteen seventy three to
(15:12):
February nineteen seventy four. Nine astronauts would visit the sky
Lab Across all three of these missions, divided up between
the three. That is, so three astronauts per mission Across
these three missions, astronauts spent a total of a hundred
seventy one days aboard sky Lab. The longest of the
three missions was for eighty four days. The cruise traveled
(15:36):
to and from Skylab. As I said, with repurposed Apollo
command modules on repurposed launch vehicles that you know, we're
meant for the Apollo program. But the Apollo program ended
and they still had these, so they're like, well, let's
use them, um, and so the Apollo capsule, the command
capsule would dock at one end of the sky Lab. Clearly,
(15:56):
they didn't have the lunar module, there was no need
for that, so that part was not attached to the spacecraft. Interestingly,
the living quarters of sky Lab were palatial compared to
the Apollo capsule. Astronauts actually, we're using a converted fuel
tank of a Saturn S for b rocket stage to
act as their living quarters, which meant that they had
(16:18):
an internal space of twelve thousand, seven hundred fifty cubic
feet or three hundred sixty one cubic meters of space.
The Apollo capsule was just two hundred eighteen cubic feet
or six point one seven cubic meters, so an enormous difference.
I imagine that when it came time to, you know,
use the bathroom, it was a lot easier to get
(16:39):
some space between you and the other astronauts. After that,
the Soviets were the only people sending crews up into
space using the Soyuz capsule. In nine, the Soviet Union
and America conducted some joint missions, with the Soviets in
a Soyuz capsule and the Americans were in the final
Apollo capsule and the two spacecraft docked with each other
(17:02):
in orbit. The two crews worked together on several experiments
before the spacecraft separated and they both returned to Earth safely.
So this was the Apollo Soyu's mission, not officially part
of the Apollo program, but using the final Apollo capsule,
and then the United States kind of hit a dry spell.
The Soviets continued to launch Soyu's capsules into space, working
(17:25):
on small Soviet space stations under the name Salute, but
for the USA the crude missions would be on hold
until the Space Shuttle was ready to launch, which had
a few delays. It was finally ready in ninety one.
NASA had hoped to use the Shuttle to help boost
sky Lab into a higher orbit and keep Skylab going.
(17:46):
But because of the delays in the Space Shuttle program,
that opportunity went away. Uh sky Labs orbit deteriorated, and
then it broke apart upon re entering the air's atmosphere
in nine so there was no way of prolonging that mission.
But now we're getting into the next era of space suits,
the Space Shuttle era. When we come back, we'll talk
(18:07):
about how those suits worked and what was different from
the Apollo era suits. But first let's take this quick break.
The Space Shuttle era does not have a single suit
that we can point to and say this is what
Space Shuttle suits were like. There are actually a few
(18:30):
different ones, and of course there's a difference between the
suits that were worn inside the Space Shuttle for normal
operations as opposed for the stuff like take off and landing,
and then the stuff worn for e v A S
or extra vehicular activities you know, going out into space.
But let's start at the beginning. The first mission, STS one,
(18:53):
which launched on April twel had two astronauts wearing suits
that were based largely on an Air Force flight suit
designated S ten thirty. These were worn by pilots aboard
the s R seventy one Blackbird aircraft. That's a long range,
high speed, and high altitude reconnaissance vehicle. I've actually talked
(19:15):
about the Blackbird in other episodes of tech Stuff. The
David Clark Company, long associated with flight and space suits,
made the variation for the early Space Shuttle cruise, and
this one became known as the S ten thirty A,
also known as the Shuttle Ejection Escape Suit. Now, as
that name suggests, the suit was intended to protect astronauts
(19:37):
in the event of an emergency ejection, and they were
rated to protect an astronaut up to an altitude of
eighty thousand feet and the speed of mock two point seven,
which is a big yalza. So let's talk about that
for a second to get our minds wrapped around what
this means. So, as you climb in the atmosphere, the
(19:58):
air pressure drops, which makes sense, right after all, on
the ground, you've got the pressure of all that atmosphere
pressing down on you. But as you go higher, you
have less atmosphere above you, and so there's less pressure
pushing down on you. At eighty thousand feet, the air
pressure is point four zero six pounds per square inch.
(20:19):
Temperature is a bit fiddly when it comes to altitudes.
The temperature drops off as you climb up to a point,
but then as you hit the stratosphere, the temperature actually
starts to go up as you climb, and then as
you get beyond the stratosphere, the temperature plunges again no joke,
But at any thousand feet you're looking at temperatures of
(20:40):
nearly negative sixty two Fahrenheits, So the suit has to
protect against both the low pressure and the low temperature.
Now let's talk about mock two point seven. Some folks
reduce mock to mean a multiple of the speed of sound,
so if you're going mock three, you're going three times
the speed of sound, which is only part of the picture,
(21:01):
because the actual explanation of mock is more complicated. And
part of that is because the nature of the speed
of sound is more complicated because sound travels at a
speed that's dependent upon the medium through which it travels. So,
in other words, sound travels at different speeds at different conditions,
and those conditions can include things like temperature, so it
(21:25):
will travel at different speed at sea level at standard
temperature than it will at eight feet. So mock actually
describes the ratio of the flow velocity of some fluid
like air compared to the speed of sound through that
particular medium. For shorthand, you could say it's like a multiplier.
(21:46):
You know, you could say, oh, it's multiplied by the
speed of sound. But just know that when you really
dig down, it gets a little more complicated than that. Now,
your typical commercial aircraft travels at a speed of around
mock zero point eight, So mock two point seven is
wicked fast. It's kind of like around you know, more
than two thousand miles per hour or approximately three thousand,
(22:09):
three hundred thirty four kilometers per hour. So the suit
needed to protect astronauts against the forces they would encounter
should they have to eject at that speed, which is
pretty crazy stuff. Now, this version of the Space Shuttle
had ejection seats for the pilot and copilot, and as
they said, those early Shuttle flights only had two astronauts
(22:30):
each to make certain that the shuttle was operating at
the expected levels and testing it out to make certain
it could go into operational status. Now, keep in mind.
The purpose of the Shuttle was to serve as a
reusable vehicle that we could take to low Earth orbit
and then come back to Earth. So the injector seats
and the escape suits or standard issue for STS one
(22:51):
through STS four, the first four test missions of the
Space Shuttle UH Space Shuttle Columbia. I should add the
suits would connect to the shuttle for the purposes of
life support. And if you ever look at a photo
of an astronaut wearing one of these, you'd say that
is non attractive space suit because they kind of look
(23:12):
like lumpy potatoes. They weren't designed for use outside the
shuttle in space, so they lacked the various layers of
thermal protection and teflon coding and whatnot to protect against
like micro meteoroids and the extremes of temperature that you
would find in outer space. There would be no need
to worry about that stuff until a bit later with
(23:32):
the first Shuttle based e v A s. The pressure
suits did have bladders in the legs, so they were
partially pressurized. They're pressurized in the lower body, and again
this was to provide the pressure needed to keep blood
from pooling in the lower extremities during times of extreme acceleration.
So this helps protect against blackouts. Right, if all your
(23:54):
blood starts rushing to the lower part of your your body,
then there's not enough in your brain to keep you,
you know, conscious. So this pressure helped prevent against that.
It helped kind of put enough pressure on the lower
limbs so that blood couldn't pool down in the lower body.
I talked about it a bit in our previous episodes.
After the first four test flight missions of the Space Shuttle,
(24:16):
NASA made a few changes, and for one thing, they
got rid of the ejection seats in the Shuttle, which
meant that the suits really weren't a fit anymore either,
because the whole reason to have the suits was as
a protective outfit in the event of having to eject
out of the Shuttle, so they got rid of them
starting with STS five, the fifth flight of the Space
(24:38):
Shuttle Columbia and the first operational flight, meaning the first
to actually be considered more than a test flight. This
was one that was delivering a payload to outer space.
The cruise on that vessel didn't wear pressurized suits during
takeoff and landing or launch and re entry. Slash landing.
They had simple flight suit. They were blue in color,
(25:01):
They weren't pressurized. They did have helmets to protect their
noggins for launch and re entry and landing, but they
weren't wearing any sort of pressurized suit with life support.
NASA was sort of following the old Soviet model, which
for many years did not have cosmonauts wearing pressurized suits
until there was this tragic decompression accident that changed things.
As it turns out, a similar tragedy would change NASA's
(25:24):
approach a few years later. Now, I don't really have
much to say about the blue flight suits because they
didn't really represent a lot of tech, and really they
showed that NASA had a high level of confidence in
the safety and operation of the Shuttle. But I can
talk about the new extra vehicular Activity or e v
A space suits. NASA planned to have two astronauts go
(25:47):
on a spacewalk during STS five, but some health issues
delayed that, and then a technical error in one of
the suits put those plans on ice until STS six,
the sixth mission that would end up being the maiden
flight of the Shuttle Challenger. And yeah, both Columbia and
Challenger have tragic ends, but STS six was a success,
(26:10):
and during that mission, astronauts put the new extra vehicular
Mobility Unit or EMU to the test. Let's talk about those.
So one big change with the e m U or
EMU was what was worn underneath it, specifically the mag
or MG that stands for maximum absorbancy garment. And if
(26:33):
you think that sounds like a diaper, it depends. Now
you're on the right track. Gone were the days of
the urine collection devices because those were meant to work
with male astronauts and the space program had finally evolved
beyond being a men only endeavor. After this, you know garment,
(26:54):
you would slide on a one piece thermal garment called
the Thermal Control undergarment. It's kind like a body suit
or long John's. And then came the Liquid Cooling and
Ventilation Garment or l c VG, similar to the one
that was worn by Apollo astronauts. This is the thing
that allows cool water to run through tubes that are
(27:15):
against the garment and help, you know, maintain a good
body temperature for the astronaut. The suit had a few
other pieces to it. The two big ones were the
lower torso assembly or l t A, and then you
had the hard upper torso or h U T hut
so as the name implies, the hard upper torso. First
(27:38):
of all, it was for the upper torso so like
the chest and shoulders and stomach even and it had
a rigid body structure made out of fiberglass which could
hold in the pressure of the suit and not have
it balloon outward. So instead of using like a tough,
tight material to restrain ballooning, this was just a you know,
a hard material. It didn't flex in all. UH the
(28:02):
arms of the suit, the helmet, and the lower torso
assembly all would connect to the h UT, as did
the p l SS UH, the primary life support system
officially known as that now, and the display controls module
would also mount on the front. This is the sort
of Darth Vader looking collection of UH indicators and and controls. Also,
(28:25):
the HUT would hold a bag filled with drinkable liquid
with a straw that would extend up to the helmet
of the astronaut, because even in space it's important to
stay hydrated. Ultimately, NASA only produced three sizes of the HUT,
which meant, in turn that the organization had a limited
number of choices when it came to which astronauts would
(28:46):
be able to go on e v A s, because
the suit was not a one size fits all kind
of deal, nor was NASA planning on custom building a
suit for every astronaut. The exterior of the EMU is
bright white, part to reflect heat and partly so that
the astronaut is extremely visible against the blackness of space.
And in total, the suit has fourteen layers, from the
(29:09):
liquid cooling layers are closest to the astronaut skin, to
a pressure suit layer, to a restraint layer to keep
that pressure in check, to a neopreen layer to hold
everything in, to seven layers of micro meteoroid and thermal
protective material, and an outer layer of kevlar nomes and gortex. Alright,
(29:31):
so an astronaut going on a n e v A
would first put on their you know there under suit,
but then they would put on the l t A
the lower half of this suit, the leggings and boots
and you know stuff that comes up to the hips essentially,
and this half is the soft half. It's the pliable
half at least when it's not pressurized. And then they
(29:53):
would put on the hut, the upper half and seal
those two together. They lock in together and have a
ceiling layer that was used necessary obviously you want to
keep a seal airtight. Then they would put on their
snoopy cap. This is a close fitting head covering that
incorporates speakers and a microphone that allows for communications with others.
(30:13):
Then they would seal on the gloves and helmet. Then
the suit would pressure eye, the p L S S
would activate, and then you would have your astronaut ready
to go. Not only took around fifteen minutes to get
into or out of the suit from beginning to end,
but the process of going on an e V A
would require a lot more prep work than just getting
(30:33):
into gear. Like you had the whole pre breathe exercise
you had to do too, alright, So connecting the p
L S S to the suit, there was another element
on the e M you called the electrical harness or
e e H or EMU electrical harness. This was worn
inside the suit, but with connections to link the p
L S S to the stuit itself, so all the
(30:55):
systems would be interconnected. The helmet had various visors to
protect against stuff like sunlight. It also had mounted headlamps
and could accommodate a TV camera transmitter as well, so
that you could get that glorious first person astronaut view.
While the David Clark Company made the pressurized suits for
the early test flights of the Space Shuttle, the e
(31:16):
m U was the product of two other companies. One
was Hamilton's Standard and the other was I L C. Dover.
And while the first real use of the e MU
was aboard the STS six after the failed attempt on
STS five, I should also add that they actually had
one of these suits on STS four during one of
the test flights, and they practiced the process of putting
(31:40):
the suit on and taking it off in zero G
to make sure that there weren't any other issues that
need to be worked out. They didn't take it on
a n E v A, they didn't leave the shuttle,
but they did practice getting into and out of it.
The e MU design would evolve a little bit over
the years, but to this day there are still e
m U s aboard the Internet Space Station. And when
(32:01):
you think about that, like how old these things are,
that's something right. The ones they're actually have a little
bit more of a modular design, which gives astronauts the
ability to change the fitting slightly, which helps them accommodate
different body sizes and types. At least to an extent,
the hut still kind of limits things a bit in
that regard. I should also mention that these things are
(32:24):
pretty heavy, at least back here on Earth. They're heavy
in space. You don't really have to worry about it. Wait,
it's not so much a thing you gotta worry when
you're in, you know, a microgravity environment. But if you
were to suit up down here, you probably wouldn't be
going on any sprints or anything like that. That's because
the Shuttle version of the e v A weighed in
and around two pounds, around a little less than a hundreds,
(32:47):
and the version that would be worn aboard the I
S S was even heftier. That was three nineteen pounds
or around a hundred. One other thing I want to
cover before we go to break is the m m
YOU or manned maneuvering unit. This was a propulsion unit
that fit over the life support system that you wore
(33:07):
on your back when you were in an e m U.
This was kind of like a jet pack for space,
although not using you know, thrusters with ignited fuel instead
using nitrogen gas as a propellant. And there were twenty
four nozzles on the m m U, so you could
use the combination of nozzles to kind of maneuver your
(33:28):
way and float through space with this backpack and not
have any other connection to the spacecraft, like no teather,
just floating around out there. Uh. You would use a
hand controls on the MMU to kind of guide where
you wanted to go. Bruce McCandless did this Ino, and
there's a famous photo of him looking back at the
(33:49):
Shuttle with nothing connecting him to the spacecraft as he
just floats above the Earth. And if I think about
it too much while I'm looking at that picture, I
actually start to feel anxiety. Is an incredible photo. The
MMU was used on only three missions before NASA retired it,
and the reason the agency sunseted the MMU was the
(34:10):
same reason that the Blue jumpsuit era would come to
an end. It would be a disaster that would change everything,
but we'll talk about that after this quick break. On
January nine, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart seventy three
(34:33):
seconds after launch, killing all aboard This was one of
those big defining moments in history, history in general, not
just the space industry. For one thing, as a launch,
multiple news outlets were covering the story live in real time,
and so the world saw this explosion happen. For another,
(34:57):
NASA had really promoted this mission heavily, part because a
high school teacher, Krista, she was part of the crew
and she would have been the first teacher in space.
And for that reason, it was something a lot of
schools were showing live on on televisions. In the whole
generation of school kids were exposed to this tragic disaster
(35:19):
in real time. And I mean I was one of them.
I was ten when it happened. I could do a
full episode about that mission and what happened as a
result of that disaster, But for our purposes, let's just
stick to the suits. NASA grounded the Space Shuttle program
(35:39):
and conducted a full investigation and evaluation of the program.
No Space Shuttle missions flew for two years and eight months,
and when the program returned, so did pressurized flight suits.
Astronauts had to wear these suits for launch and for
re entry and landing, so once again they had to
wear a specific suit for those moments in a mission.
(36:02):
They were officially called the launch entry suit. These new
suits would get the nickname pumpkin suits because they were
bright orange in color, and the thinking was that in
an emergency evacuation, they would likely be over water and
the bright orange color would make the suits really easy
to spot against the ocean. The suits had partial pressurization,
(36:25):
they were not fully pressurized, so again around the legs
to prevent blackouts. So similar to the ejection suits that
were worn in the test flights of the Space Shell
for Sts one through four, the gloves for the suits
would actually just zipper onto the suits themselves. They did
not have like the ring locking mechanism that other suits did.
(36:49):
They came with a helmet with a polycarbonate face plate
that could seal onto the neck of the suit. The
astronauts also wore heavy duty boots in addition to the suit,
and they had a survival backpack which included stuff like
a parachute and a life raft, among some other things.
As space suits go, this one kind of sat between
the emergency ejection suits of the early Shuttle tests and
(37:10):
the jumpsuit that astronauts wore up to the Challenger disaster.
They were kind of smacked out in the middle. These
suits remained in use until the mid nineties, when NASA
would replace them with the Advanced Crew Escape Suit or
ACES a c S. These are also called pumpkin suits
they also because they're bright orange, but they are puffier
(37:31):
than the ELIS suits that came before them, so unlike
the l E S the ACES suits for the later
spatial era, they were in our full pressure suits. They
aren't just partially pressurized, so rather than having zippered connections
for the gloves, the gloves lock on through lock rings,
much like E m U suits do. They also include
(37:53):
a liquid cooling mechanism to help with body temperature, so
we're back to that as well, and the ACES suit
has a detachable helmet and also comes complete with a
survival backpack, similar to the l E S. Like the
l E S, astronauts would wear the ACES suit during
launch and re entry and landing. It's very similar to
the so Cool suits that the Russians use. Uh the
(38:15):
Russians suit helmet is permanently attached to the suit, and
there's no backpack on the so called suits because there's
not enough room in a Soyuz capsule to handle one.
But these are the suits that have been in use
long after the Shuttle program has come to an end.
And now let's talk a little bit about some planned suits,
(38:35):
including a couple that never entered into service. One of
those was the Constellation space suits. I shouldn't say one
two of them were Constellation space suits because there were
two different versions. So the Constellation project was meant to
pick up where the Space Shuttle was leaving off, with
the idea being that the new spacecraft would take astronauts
(38:56):
to and from the International Space Station and ultimately to
the Moon, hopefully by twenty twenty. This would be the
Orion spacecraft. And if you are paying attention, you know
that came and went and no one was going to
the moon. Well, the Constellation program ultimately got the acts
after a full review of the program revealed that it
(39:16):
would be unsuccessful without a substantial increase in the budget.
But had it gone ahead, we would have seen a
new type of space suit meant to be worn both
during critical maneuvers such as during launch and reentry, as
well as for e v A s. So, in other words,
astronauts would have an indoor outdoor space suit, and there
(39:37):
were two planned configurations of this suit. Configuration one would
have covered most missions with a full pressure suit that
included a closed loop environmental system allowing for operation in space,
and like some of the older suits I've talked about,
this one would connect to the Orion spacecraft's life support
system through an umbilical tether rather than incorporating its own
(39:59):
p L s US. The second configuration was planned for
lunar missions. This was more of a heavy duty one.
The suit would make use of the same arms, legs, boots, helmet,
and gloves as Configuration one's suit, but to have a
different torso section. It would also allow for higher pressure
within the suit, something that could head off issues like
(40:20):
decompression sickness, which I mentioned about earlier, the bends, that
kind of thing. While the US discontinued the Constellation program
in two, NASA continued to develop the Constellation space suit,
but simultaneously, a different department within NASA was working on
the Advanced Space Suit project. So you had two different
(40:40):
space suit programs working at the same time. Let's talk
about this Advanced Space Suit Project one. The initiative developed
two designs for e v A suits. The Z one
and the Z two. The Z one uses a soft
suit approach, meaning you know, it's mostly pliable when it's
not pressurized. It has some hard components, but it's mostly fabric.
(41:02):
Has a large dome shaped helmet attached to the suit.
Kind of looks like buzz Lightyear. In fact, the white
suit has like some green lines on it and all
the pictures of it, so it really does look like
a buzz light ear suit. And it splits into upper
and lower torso segments as well as having assembly mechanisms
for gloves and boots to attach to the suit. The
(41:23):
Z two has a hard upper torso rather than a
soft one, so it's similar to the E m U
suit I mentioned earlier. In addition to the Z one
and Z two, the projects spawned an updated p l SS.
This one was called the Next Generation Life Support where
in g l S complete with an improved method for
removing carbon dioxide phone the suit's air supply. In sixteen,
(41:46):
NASA made the decision to combine the information that had
been learned from the Constellation project as well as the
Advanced Space Suit Project and create a new one kind
of like Vultron. All this joining together to find the
x e m U project ZIMU, I guess or x
AMU if you prefer uh. This is the specific project
(42:08):
that the audit found to be behind schedule, to the
point that the Artemis programming, which we were supposed to
go back to the Moon by twenty four is not
going to happen at least not on that timetable. In fact,
according to the report, these suits will not be ready
until April at the earliest. That's if everything goes right.
(42:28):
The report on those suits is available online and it
is heck and thorough, y'all. In that report, we learned
that the Constellation suit program cost a hundred thirty five
points seven million bucks before it came to an end,
the Advanced Space Suit pro project that costs another fifty
one point six million dollars, and the x EMU has
(42:49):
cost so far around two hundred thirty two point eight
million dollars. I did the math, and that means that
NASA has spent more than four hundred twenty million dollars
on the next generation of space suits already four twenty
NASA is just blazing through that cash, and according to
the report, it's not even halfway to what will ultimately
(43:10):
get spent on these suits before they are fully built,
tested and deployed. Yeza. Still, when you're talking about keeping
people alive in space, it's obviously it's gonna cost a
lot of money. But what happened, well, that's complicated. So
one bit is that there are multiple offices or departments
within NASA responsible for space suit development. They aren't always
(43:33):
working on the same projects or with each other, so
you've got a lot of overlap. Potentially you've got a
lot of potential wasted effort because it's not a unified approach.
This doesn't mean that it's always a bad thing, because
you can often get really good ideas coming out of
totally different groups that would would have died on the
vine if it had been a unified project. But it
(43:55):
does make it more complicated. So like this is like
when NASA side that the Constellation program and the Advanced
Space Suit program needed to kind of combine into each other.
For another. As I mentioned before, NASA is an organization
that sees a lot of changes every year. For one thing,
there's always a political battle over NASA's funding. Any agency
(44:17):
that's dependent upon federal funds is going to find it
hard to stay on track because support can fluctuate from
year to year. You might get a year where you
get more financial support and another year where no one
is really supporting you, and that makes it really hard
to stay on task with projects. For another, the head
of NASA gets their position courtesy of whomever happens to
(44:38):
be president, so that means leadership and NASA changes fairly regularly,
and that can mean projects that were in progress might
end up being put on the back shelf or even
getting the acts. NASA, I want to add, is an
incredible agency. There are countless people devoted to the pursuit
of science and knowledge who are working there. They are innovating,
(45:01):
they're solving problems that are really spectacular problems. But they
also have to work in a system that isn't always
dependable or stable. Right like, things change, priorities change, leadership changes,
and this sometimes means that something that was in development
gets taken off development. And when you add to that
(45:23):
the normal challenges of just trying to create technology with
all the designing and testing and then the redesigning and
rebuilding and retesting and all of that effort, particularly for
technology that's meant to help keep people alive in an
environment that is trying to kill you, and you can
see why there are issues. My hope is that we
will see the x E m U suits emerge. We
(45:46):
need them, the I S S needs them, and there
are some cool things that they're supposed to incorporate. Now.
I'm holding off on going into detail about all that because,
as we've seen, sometimes stuff that we plan for just
doesn't pan out, like a feature that was considered to
be critical ends up getting cut. So I don't want
to cover all the things that are planned for it.
(46:06):
I want to wait to see what happens. But believe me,
if we get to a point where we've got a
working x E m U suit ready to go into service,
I will come back to this topic and we will
do a full episode on it, and that ends our
journey about the evolution of space suits. So far, I
didn't really cover the private space suits sector. I might
do that in a future episode at some point. Um
(46:28):
It's one that I have mixed feelings about because I
often feel that people like Elon musk Um dismiss how
hard this is to do safely and properly. But on
the other hand, there is something to be said about
having the entire process under the control of a single company.
So there are advantages to the private space approach that
(46:51):
a federally funded agency like NASA cannot take advantage of.
That that much is true. I just don't know that
musk boasting that he could get it done through SpaceX
and take care of NASA's space suit problem is really
that accurate. But who am I to say maybe they'll
be able to do it. We'll have to wait and see,
(47:13):
and that's it. If you have suggestions for topics I
should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's
a company, technology, a trend in tech. Maybe it's just
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