How does a human survive in outer space? Outside the protective shell of Earth's
atmosphere lies an endless void of cold, black emptiness, an environment where no
life, none as we know it at least, can be sustained. And
yet human beings have stepped into that void with all of our infinite fragilities,
and we have lived to tell the tale. In fact, over hundreds of
excursions into the cosmic vacuum across six decades of human spaceflight, and no person
has ever died in space. So let's talk about the evolution of the space
suit. This is the space race. So the basic idea for surviving an
environment that is so far distant from the surface of the Earth is to bring
as much of the Earth's environment along with you as you can. That means
ambient pressure, air quality, and temperature all need to remain consistent throughout your
journey. This is something that human beings began to discover long before spaceflight.
In the year nineteen thirty two, a Swiss physicist named August Picard decided that
he would push the boundaries of the human experience and fly to a height of
sixteen thousand meters or fifty two thousand feet in a helium balloon. Picard was
smart enough to know that there was not enough atmosphere at that altitude for him
to survive, so he built an aluminum sphere and pressurized it with compressed air.
Anyone who has climbed a mountain, or even just seeing other people climb
mountains on TV, knows that as you get higher into the sky, the
air becomes thin and it becomes much more difficult to breathe in enough oxygen.
But an even more dangerous side effect of high altitude is the decrease in ambient
pressure that happens as a result of the lower density in the atmosphere. The
boiling point of a liquid is determined by two main factors, temperature and pressure.
The lower the ambient pressure, the lower the temperature at which a liquid
will convert to vapor. Human beings are made up mostly of liquids, and
we like to keep it that way. At an altitude of sixty three thousand
feet or nineteen thousand meters above sea level, the ambient pressure drops to a
point where water can boil at just thirty seven degrees celsius or ninety nine fahrenheit,
which is normal human body temperature. So at this point, it doesn't
matter how much oxygen you have to breathe without pressure, you're about to have
a very bad day. So floating under a balloon in a pressure vessel is
one way to do it. But what if you want to push the boundaries
in something with a little more control, like an airplane. Let's talk about
Wily Post, an American pilot who was the first person to fly solo around
the world. He was a bit of a rogue and a daredevil, you
can tell by the eye patch and one eyed. Willie built his own custom
supercharged airplane named the Winnie May. This souped up machine had the power to
reach fifteen thousand meters in altitude, where Willie knew that he could ride the
jet stream to travel even further and faster than ever before. His plane may
have been up to the task, but he was smart enough to know that
his body wasn't sturdy enough. So Willie Post teamed up with the automotive tire
makers BF Goodrich to craft the first ever pressure suit in nineteen thirty four.
The body of the suit had three layers, starting with long underwear on the
inside, covered by a black rubber air pressure bladder and an outer layer made
of rubberized parachute fabric. The outer layer was glued to a frame with arm
and leg joints that allowed him to operate the flight controls and to walk to
and from the aircraft. Attached to the framework pigskin gloves, rubber boots,
and a scuba diver's helmet made from aluminum and plastic. Now, the first
real pressure suits that weren't homemade by a one eyed lunatic and a tire shop
were done by the US Air Force when the first high altitude bombers were developed
in the mid nineteen forties. Giant planes like the B thirty six Piecemaker were
able to reach cruising heights over forty thousand feet at point. An oxygen mask
alone is just not enough to keep the crew functioning, and while the interior
cabin of these planes were pressurized just like a commercial airliner, this bomber was
meant for active combat and any damage to the outer shell would cause a rapid
depressurization event, so the crew would need their own pressure suits with fully enclosed
helmets. By the mid fifties, the US had developed their Utube spyplane,
an aircraft that could reach a staggering altitude of twenty one thousand meters or sixty
nine thousand feet above sea level, high above Soviet radar and missile capability.
A new flight suit was developed for YouTube pilots that would maintain their body pressure
throughout the mission and prevent their blood from boiling at the extreme altitude. By
the late nineteen fifties, the first ever space race had officially begun, with
the United States and Soviet Union both developing the technology that would not only put
a man into outer space but also get him back come alive. That was
actually the tricky part. The US Air Force started experimenting with ultra high speed,
high altitude flight in their X fifteen rocket plane. In order to survive
these hypersonic missions to the edge of the atmosphere, an even more advanced full
pressure flight suit was developed, the XMC two, and this is where the
modern image of the space suit really begins to take shape. Of course,
we have been talking a lot about American technology here, but the first real
space suit was worn by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin aboard vostok Ie as the Soviets claimed
victory in the first leg of the space race, circling the Earth at a
speed of twenty seven thousand, four hundred kilometers per hour on a one hundred
and eight minute flight. Uri suit was critical to his survival on that mission
because even though the capsule maintained pressure throughout the flight, the Vostok capsule was
not able to land safely on the Earth, so the pilot had to bail
out at an altitude of twenty three thousand feet and parachute the rest of the
way down. After being officially formed in nineteen fifty nine, NASA set to
work on developing their own space suit, using the existing Air Force pressure suits
as their template. The first innovation that NASA scientists brought to spacesuit design was
to replace the outer covering of the Air Force suits with illuminized nylon for better
thermal insulation, and they removed the rubber seals that isolated the helmet from the
rest of the suit, pumping air in from the waste to help cool the
suit through airflow. This was the suit used by the Project Mercury astronauts.
Their flight plans were relatively simple, reach orbit, and come back down again.
The spacesuit was only there as a protective measure if the capsule lost pressure,
but luckily that never happened. It's not until Project Gemini where things get
real. For NASA, it's time to leave the capsule, and now the
astronauts require a spacesuit that will actively keep them alive in the vacuum of space.
Now again, it's probably important to note that the Soviet Union also achieved
the first spacewalk before NASA. On March eighteenth, nineteen sixty five, Soviet
cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to leave a space capsule and float freely
in orbit. This was a learning experience for the brand new field of human
space exploration because no one had ever tried to use a pressurized suit in a
total vacuum before. So what happened to Alexei was that his suit puffed up
like a balloon. He was barely able to move, he couldn't even reach
the shutter on his camera, and worst of all, the suit grew so
big that he couldn't fit back inside the Vostok capsule. So Alexei had to
vent his own atmosphere out into space in order to shrink down enough to squeeze
through the airlock and back into the safety of his vehicle. Just two months
later, it was NASA's turn to enter the void. An astronaut Ed White,
made the first American spacewalk d a much easier time on his execution.
Instead of a bulky life support backpack like the Soviets, White was tethered to
the capsule for life support, and NASA's upgraded space suit design for Gemini incorporated
a mesh into the outer structure of the suit that prevented the ballooning issue.
White maneuvered easily through the vacuum using a handheld air pressure gun that functioned like
a control thruster. The mission was a resounding success. NASA would leverage the
Gemini mission to learn as much as they possibly could about extra vehicular activity in
space as quickly as they could manage. President Kennedy had made the promise that
Americans would walk on the Moon before the end of the nineteen sixties, and
NASA wasn't about to let JFK's dream die alongside the man, so they pressed
on towards the first lunar space suit, their most demanding task yet. The
first major change for the lunar suit would be the need for a self contained
life support system. The tethering cable from the Gemini emissions wouldn't cut it for
exploring the Moon, so the astronauts needed backpacks big ones. Yet they still
had to balance and move freely in a low gravity environment. But even if
they got the balance perfect, it was still likely that the astronauts were going
to fall down on the Moon, so the suit needed to be tough.
A new material of woven silica fibers coated with teflon was developed as an outer
shell for the new suit. On the inside of the lunar suit, there
was a tight fitting system of bellows and mechanical joints that would give the astronauts
full mobility while under pressure. The inner layer of the suit was plumbed with
a network of cooling tubes that circulated water over the astronaut's body to remove heat
at Earth gravity. The suit weighed thirty five kilograms, plus another sixty kilograms
for the backpack, which is a total of two hundred and nine pounds.
This suit brought Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldron to the surface of the Moon,
NASA's first real wind in the space race, but it was as a definitive
victory. NASA used their experience with the Apollo mission to gradually improve on their
spacesuit design as they went, but out of the twelve individuals to set foot
on the Moon, there was not one single issue related to their spacesuits.
The promise of the Space Shuttle program was that human beings were now going to
live and work in outer space on a regular basis, a sustained presence in
Low Earth orbit, and for that we would again need an improved spacesuit design
that could support long duration spacewalks while exposed to the vacuum and the raw intensity
of the Sun. The Apollo suit was again used as the basis for the
extra Vehicular Mobility Unit or EMU that would be paired with the Space Shuttle.
Because these suits were made exclusively for use in zero G, they could be
much heavier and more rigid than the Apollo designs. The EMU was created with
a modular design, with each component made in a variety of sizes, so
that any astronaut would be to piece together a suit to fit their body shape.
The EMU also had the ability to equip a new jet pack design that
allowed astronauts to float freely in outer space untethered to their vehicle, although this
unit was eventually retired for just being a bit too dangerous to be worthwhile.
These EMU suits were put to their ultimate test when the Hubble space telescope was
deployed in nineteen ninety. The idea behind Hubble was that it could be served
regularly by Space Shuttle astronauts to prolong the lifespan and functionality of the orbital platform.
This would require long and complex spacewalks to be performed on Hubble, which
orbits at a high altitude of three hundred and forty miles above sea level,
about a hundred miles higher than the ISS. In order to train for these
spacewalks, NASA developed their Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. This is the pool of water
that you see astronauts practicing in. Over the decades that the Space Shuttle operated,
these EMU suits were steadily upgraded with enhanced safety features like a simple maneuvering
thruster system, an upgraded battery, and improved heating in the glove section of
the suit. These are the same suits that are used to this day for
spacewalks on the ISS. There hasn't really been a significant redesign of the American
space suit until now. On March fifteen, twenty twenty three, Axiom Space
unveiled the long awaited redesign of NASA's extra vehicular mobility units, a new space
suit that would again take human beings to the surface of the Moon on the
Artemis three mission. The Axiom design was contracted out by NASA, who simply
lacked the sources and funding in the modern era to design their own lunar suit.
Axiom have essentially taken everything that was learned through the era of the EMU
and the spacewalks conducted on the Shuttle and ISS, then they packaged that technology
into a suit that would give astronauts the mobile they required to operate on long
duration missions to the Moon. What sets Artemis apart from Apollo is the new
directive to establish a permanent presence on the Moon. So instead of staying on
the surface for a few hours and then coming home, Artemis crew members will
live and work on the Moon for weeks at a time. So this demands
a spacesuit with a higher level of comfort and durability, combined with the mobility
that is going to be required to literally build the first Moon base. All
that's left now is to imagine the future and the first spacesuit that will allow
human beings to walk on the surface of Mars.