The Next Generation Space Suit

TED SOUTHERN: A space suit is an enclosure to protect a human being from the extreme environments of space. The classic way of talking about an EVA suit is a spaceship for one. So how is it possible for two guys to make space suits that historically have been built by whole teams of people? How is it possible? Maybe we shouldn't be doing this. My name is Ted Southern. We are here at the Final Frontier Design studio. NIK MOISEEV: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN] TED SOUTHERN: I moved to New York and told people I wanted to make body armor for a living, and that was really my goal in life. And I was lucky, within about a year of living here, to find a costume shop, Izquierdo Studios in Chelsea, that actually did make body armor. And 10 years at Izquierdo Studio taught me a lot of different things about a lot of different materials. I still do costuming now independently. I got started making wings for Victoria's Secret, and I'm still doing that now. I actually see a lot of commonality between costuming and space suits. You're obviously building for the human body. You want something to be comfortable and functional. I suppose, on paper, I would be the creative one coming up with crazy ideas and Nik would keep me in line. But sometimes it's the other way around. With space suits, it's a longer process. There's generally a little bit more money involved, a little bit higher technology. But I really see it as a continuum, and there's a great deal of relation. And Nik and I were competitors in the 2007 Astronaut Glove Competition, which is part of NASA's Centennial Challenges, sort of like the X PRIZES. The challenge was to redesign a space suit glove to have lower torque and higher mobility than NASA's current technology. With the glove, it's been a consistent problem. It's sort of the weak point of design for a space suit. It is the most functional part of the suit, and a critical part of astronaut efficiency. Neither one of us won in 2007. And I gave you a ride back to New York City afterwards, right? NIK MOISEEV: Right. TED SOUTHERN: And kind of never thought I would see him again. But he kept in touch through email, and we decided to become partners for the 2009 Astronaut Glove Competition. And we outperformed NASA's current technology and won some money. We won second place and formed an LLC from there. So here at Final Frontier Design, we are working specifically on IVA suits now. We're trying to meet a market demand in the new commercial space industry for launch and reentry suits. TED SOUTHERN: This is a vacuum chamber glove box. It pulls pressure out from inside this chamber and mimics that pressure differential you would have inside a suit. The gloves are obviously really important to test on their own as much as possible, because it really is the human interaction with space. It's how humans get work done, is with their hands. But we can go in here and try different tests for dexterity. One of the ones that I think is particularly hard is this peg board. Last time I was at the Johnson Space Center, we used their vacuum chamber glove box, and inside they had a Rubik's cube. So I felt like I needed a Rubik's cube in my vacuum chamber as well. So this is what we call the Frontier Prime, it's our first full-body pressure garment. This suit was a collaboration between the two of us, Nikolay built the outer garment. So this is what we call the 2G suit, the second generation suit. The real advantage of this suit is it's almost entirely single layer. So it is a challenge for two guys to be making space suits when historically it's been the dominion of crews of engineers. But we've made a lot of accomplishments so far. Obviously, we started with gloves, which are one of the most specific and heavy-designed parts of a space suit. And we've made a great deal of improvements over the years in not just our gloves, but obviously we've moved on to a whole suit. We're testing at levels that NASA tests at, as far as leakage rates, as far as range of motion, as far as cycling, as far as torque. TED SOUTHERN: It's low weight. It's low mass, which is a huge driver in space travel. There are generally considered to be two kinds of space suits. One is an IVA suit, which is sort of a launch, reentry, and docking suit. IVA is Intra-Vehicular Activity. The EVA suits, Extra-Vehicular Activity, are a lot more complicated. They have life support generally on their back. They have enclosures over the pressure garment that protect from thermal extremes, micrometeoroids, sometimes radiation. Even before Americans were going to space, they were going to very high altitudes where they needed protection from the extreme environment. And I think the most classic case of-- the pioneer of that is Wiley Post. He's an early aviator who did a lot of experience with pressure garments. He had a distinct advantage because he only had one eye, so he could turn the visor of his helmet to one side and get good peripheral vision. He used pretty crude and rudimentary things-- squirrel fur and really thick rubber and very restricted mobility-- and was very dependent on the capsule that he was in. NIK MOISEEV: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN] TED SOUTHERN: Obviously, with NASA, space suits improved quite a bit. The Mercury suits were much more anthropomorphic and functional, but we didn't see EVA until Gemini. The Apollo suits that went to the Moon were even a great deal more functional than the Gemini suits who only saw limited EVA. -I like to skip along. -Not me, boy. Skip. -Well, whatever you call it. NIK MOISEEV: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN] TED SOUTHERN: Today's current EMU has a really long lifespan on orbit. It's capable of 8 to 10 hour EVAs, through a great variety of sizes of people. There are females and males who are doing work in space suits now. So it's come a long way since Wiley Post for sure. -Wave for the camera. That's good. All right. NIK MOISEEV: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN] TED SOUTHERN: So I'm pretty excited about the waist belt. We really need to work on that. NIK MOISEEV: I am so hungry that-- TED SOUTHERN: Are you hungry? But we just ate. So in June of this year, June of 2012, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to help us support our new company, and to really sort of announce that we're ready to build a flight-certified suit. So thank you for your Kickstarter support. All right. NIK MOISEEV: Give me five. TED SOUTHERN: We were successful. We reached our funding goals. But I think more importantly than that, we got customers. We got press. We got people aware of our project. We are working now with Zero2Infinity, which is, as I mentioned, the Spanish high-altitude balloon company. I think it'll give a lot of validation to work at altitude and to test these suits in flight before they start going on rockets. So we're really excited be working with them. It's exciting for us to be around in this time where the commercial industry is just starting to exist. I think there's a lot of very optimistic people saying next year we'll fly. It's a long wait, but I think it's really exciting that it's actually happening. And I think once the industry gains a little bit of traction, it will really expand quite quickly. It's part of human destiny to move beyond Earth. It may take a long time, but I think that it's part of our future. There's a great William Burroughs quote where he says human beings are not destined to remain human beings any more than a tadpole is destined to remain a tadpole. We will evolve. We will move on past Earth. NIK MOISEEV: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN].