New York — This weekend, I watched as Prada and Axiom Space unveiled the next-generation Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment for astronauts on the moon. This is a critical piece of Axiom’s new AxEMU spacesuits the company is designing with Prada for NASA’s Artemis lunar missions. And it comes complete with stirrup pants and thumb holes.
High fashion hit the Artemis program when designer fashion house Prada and aerospace company Axiom teamed up to create AxEMU, the spacesuits that NASA astronauts will be wearing on the moon. And in a reveal on Sunday (June 7), we finally got a look at the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG for short).
“This is the garment that astronauts wear inside the suit,” Axiom Space Senior Vice President Russell Ralston told Space.com during a press event at Prada on June 7. “It provides them comfort, cooling, and those kinds of things … really proud of the design.”
Checking out the design
The LCVG looks like a really cool piece of activewear. From the v-neck to the thumbhole sleeves, throwback stirrup pants, tech-y tubing and Prada’s signature red stripe, this thing looks cool. But it does a lot more than look cool.
“It’s not oftentimes that astrophysics [and] aeronautics develops things that are aesthetically pleasing,” Axiom Space CEO and President Jonathan Cirtain said at the event. But, he added, “while aesthetically pleasing, this is a safety suit … it’s a really remarkable piece of technology.”
The garment is made with built-in channels in which small tubes carrying cooling liquid are placed. These tubes will circulate this liquid around the suit, providing temperature control. This design is an upgrade on previous designs which have had such tubes threaded through mesh material, a time-consuming task, Ralston said. The suit also has larger, black tubes that carry air first over the wearer’s face and then around the body, “providing carbon dioxide management as they exhale, and providing oxygen back to the astronauts as they inhale,” according to Cirtain.
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The garment is intended for use by future moonwalking astronauts, though Cirtain noted that it might be tested first with astronauts onboard the International Space Station, and some testing might even occur with NASA’s upcoming Artemis 3 mission, though this mission will not land astronauts on the lunar surface.
This new garment (and modified iterations of the garment and spacesuit) have gone through a variety of temperature, gravity, and other environmental testing. In addition to possible ISS testing time, the suit is also likely to be tested in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (the giant swimming pool where astronauts practice for space).
AxEMU along with its undersuit the LCVG isn’t just the newest moon-bound spacesuit, it has major improvements over the Apollo spacesuits, the last suits to protect humans on the lunar surface. And this is for good reason. Not only has there been significant technological progress in the 54 years since the final Apollo moon mission in 1972, but the Artemis 4 mission (the first Artemis mission slated to land humans on the moon) will send astronauts to the lunar South Pole, which is notably colder than previously explored regions on the moon.
The moon’s South Pole where Artemis astronauts will land is “a very complex environment, and so there’s a lot of interesting upgrades we’ve made to what’s been available in the past,” Cirtain told Space.com during this press event.
“The South Pole is not always in sunlight; sometimes it’s in shadow,” Cirtain added, “The temperature differential from sunlight to shadow can be over 400 degrees [Fahrenheit].”
In addition to being more technologically advanced to both keep with the times and contend with the extreme lunar environments, the pair also intend for these suits to fit better, possibly offering bespoke fits for each astronaut, and also be easier to customize than previous spacesuits. They intend to accomplish this using a combination of Prada’s existing manufacturing practices and by making the suits modular, so individual components could be both uniquely sized and individually swapped out, a more economical process than swapping out an entire suit.
“I think that that’s something that’s important for this new era of spaceflight, where we want to see thousands and millions of people go to space,” Ralston told Space.com. “We can’t keep doing things the way they were done in the past, that’s not going to get us there.”
While this is the first sight of the LCVG, this isn’t our first look at the AxEMU spacesuit. Initial reveals showed the suit first in orange and blue to shield not-yet-revealed details, and then in its final coloration in bright white. This light color helps to reflect sunlight and heat, helping astronauts to maintain a comfortable body temperature, and the white material also makes lunar dust very visible, allowing astronauts to more easily keep track and dust off.
While Prada’s involvement in spacesuit design might seem unusual, the pair appear to be in lock-step with not just the style, but the engineering of the suit as well. For example, Prada’s materials expertise enabled them to contribute “the ballistic material on the outside of the suit,” Cirtain told Space.com. This material allows the suit “to maintain its integrity and not tear while in that unique environment.”
This fashion and aerospace partnership also follows in the footsteps of spacesuit history. When NASA set out to find the right contractors to work with on the Apollo spacesuits, they ended up working with ILC Dover, a small company in Delaware connected to famous bra maker Playtex. ILC Dover used their expert sewists and knowledge in materials like nylon to create a suit that astronauts could actually move around in, while Hamilton Standard (now Collins Aerospace) provided the life-support hardware to complete the suits.