WASHINGTON — Collins Aerospace, one of the companies with a NASA award to develop a new generation of spacesuits, has completed a series of tests of that design in a microgravity environment on an aircraft.
The company, which won an Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contract from NASA in 2022, said last week it completed tests called the Crew Capability Assessment. Those tests examined how well a person wearing the suit could perform tasks that an astronaut on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station might do.
Those tests were conducted onboard an aircraft flying parabolic arcs that allows for 15 to 25 seconds of microgravity at a time. That meant breaking down a specific activity “into its most fundamental pieces” that can be done within that time, said Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who is now chief test astronaut at Collins, in an interview.
Examples of those tasks, he said, include entering and exiting an airlock hatch, attaching the suit’s boots to a foot restraint and manipulating connectors. “What we were looking for is to verify the design that we had put forward,” he said. “That design solution does indeed allow for full range of motion through the work envelope that the suit is being built towards.”
Collins planned two days of flights to complete about 20 test objectives, he said, but was able to get them all done in one day. The second day was then used to perform additional engineering evaluations on the suit.
The company is working on a suit intended to replace the decades-old Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits currently used on the ISS under a task order Collins won in December 2022. Collins says its design is intended to be less bulky than the EMU and support a wider range of body types.
“My honest opinion is that it is a far more capable suit,” said Olivas, who performed five spacewalks spanning more than 34 hours during two shuttle missions while at…
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