NASA announced recently their plans to reach the moon by 2024. This announcement turned up the pressure to find a new replacement for NASA’s previous moon spacesuit, which still dates back to the 1970s.
“NASA still doesn’t have a suit because the decision was taken suddenly,” Pablo de Leon, engineer and director of a NASA financed spacesuit project at the University of North Dakota, told AFP. “On the one hand, there’s this order to get to the Moon by 2024, and on the other, we haven’t developed new spacesuits since 1977.”
The space agency has a lot of work ahead of it to get American astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface by 2024 — a deadline that is looking increasingly impossible to meet to experts.
There are a lot of factors to consider in designing a spacesuit, and it would surely take time before NASA is able to create a new one.
See more details of this news over at Futurism.
(Image Credit: WikiImages/ Pixabay)
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Unlike the last time they aren't working from scratch. NASA has been designing Mars suits and has all the data from that last moon suits. With 3D printing and modern materials I think they could begin testing quickly once designs were chosen. Likely they take the chance to test the Mars suits with Moon adaptations.
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