spacesuits

Quite likely or else the suppliers will go bust.

It is very tricky to design a flexible space suit since the thing is inflated like a balloon in a high vacuum and you cannot afford to have it leak or to be compromised by a sharp rock. Moon dust is remarkably sharp and abrasive so I pity any mechanical seals on the joints.

The strength needed to make them hold the required internal pressure in a vacuum makes the fabric in a cylinder for limbs rather inflexible.

It will make the Artemis moon visits interesting... (in the old Chinese sense)

How about giant hamster balls? (With retractable spider legs.)

Or, "Winner! 500 dollar!". ("Bubble Boy".)

"Another NASA blunder saw the agency decide not to set a standard for all spacesuit manufacturers to meet." Not really, any standard would have to be so non-specific as to be unusable. But one would expect NASA to call out the required compatibilities and adaptabilities for a realistic range of existing vehicles in the original contract. From that point on, any vehicle contracts can specify the accommodation of the existing spacesuit.

The highest risk for a firm fixed price contract is that the contractor can get close enough to realistically estimate the cost for a high risk project with such an incomplete or nonexistent specification of so many tasks to reach the endpoint. It sounds like a cost-saving measure, but there has to be so much margin built into the estimate that it probably isn't. And that's why cost-plus is more appropriate. Then the business about service-based contract is obviously to offload the contract and development oversight onto the contractor because NASA can't do that kind of work either.

NASA needs to work in the existing spacesuit work at SpaceX, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and ILC Dover, and drop these two losers.

Am 21.04.26 um 20:14 schrieb john larkin:

For my purposes, the old ones were good enough :-)

I was also in the mockup of the space lab that is part of the ISS. As a working place for 3 people, one must like each other quite well. One cannot avoid the colleages.

Gerhard

Wow such a high resolution face from a low resolution camera .. And better color too than the rest of the picture. AI generated?

No, we had a meeting at DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich and near the entrance was a 2 meter high picture with the face cut out. No AI, just my cell phone.

Gerhard

Nicely done OK!

What pressure are they at? I would have guessed that 0.2 Atm with 100% O2 would work, but I've never been to the moon.