Space Suit Design 1987 NASA Zero Prebreathe & Hard Spacesuits at JSC & ARC

more at http://scitech.quickfound.net/astro/nasa_news.html "This video shows how space suits evolved to those being designed for the Space Station Freedom." Public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_suit A space suit is a garment worn to keep a human alive in the harsh environment of outer space, vacuum and temperature extremes... Some of these requirements also apply to pressure suits worn for other specialized tasks, such as high-altitude reconnaissance flight. Above Armstrong's Line (around 19,000 m/62,000 ft), the atmosphere is so thin that pressurized suits are needed. The first full pressure-suits for use at extreme altitudes were designed by individual inventors as early as the 1930s. The first space suit worn by a human in space was the Soviet SK-1 suit worn by Yuri Gagarin in 1961... Hard-shell suits Hard-shell suits are usually made of metal or composite materials and do not use fabric for joints. Hard suits joints use ball bearings and wedge-ring segments similar to an adjustable elbow of a stove pipe to allow a wide range of movement with the arms and legs. The joints maintain a constant volume of air internally and do not have any counter force. Therefore, the astronaut does not need to exert to hold the suit in any position. Hard suits can also operate at higher pressures which would eliminate the need for an astronaut to pre-breathe oxygen to use a 34 kPa (4.9 psi) space suit before an EVA from the 101 kPa (14.6 psi) space shuttle as astronauts currently do. The joints may get into a restricted or locked position requiring the astronaut to manipulate or program the joint. The Nasa Ames AX5 suit had a flexibility rating of 95%. The wearer could move into 95% of the positions he or she could while nude. Hybrid suits Hybrid suits have hard-shell parts and fabric parts. NASA's Extravehicular Mobility Unit uses a fiberglass Hard Upper Torso (HUT) and fabric limbs. ILC Dover's I-Suit replaces the hard upper torso with a fabric soft upper torso to save weight, restricting the use of hard components to the joint bearings, helmet, waist seal, and rear entry hatch... Emerging technologies... Mark III The Mark III is a NASA prototype, constructed by ILC Dover, which incorporates a hard lower torso section and a mix of soft and hard components. The Mark III is markedly more mobile than previous suits, despite its high operating pressure (57 kPa/8.3 psi), which makes it a "zero-prebreathe" suit, meaning that astronauts would be able to transition directly from a one atmosphere, mixed-gas space station environment, such as that on the International Space Station, to the suit, without risking decompression sickness, which can occur with rapid depressurization from an atmosphere containing Nitrogen or another inert gas. I-Suit The I-Suit is a spacesuit prototype also constructed by ILC Dover, which incorporates several design improvements over the EMU, including a weight-saving soft upper torso. Both the Mark III and the I-Suit have taken part in NASA's annual Desert Research and Technology Studies (D-RATS) field trials, during which suit occupants interact with one another, and with rovers and other equipment... North Dakota suit Beginning in May 2006 five North Dakota colleges collaborated on a new spacesuit prototype, funded by a $100,000 grant from NASA, to demonstrate technologies which could be incorporated into a planetary suit. The suit was tested in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park badlands of western North Dakota. The suit has a mass of 47 pounds (21 kg) without a life support backpack, and costs only a fraction of the standard $12,000,000 cost for a flight-rated NASA spacesuit... Aouda.X Since 2009, the Austrian Space Forum has been developing "Aouda.X", an experimental Mars analogue spacesuit.. NASA Constellation Space Suit system On August 2, 2006, NASA indicated plans to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the design, development, certification, production, and sustaining engineering of the Constellation Space Suit to meet the needs of Project Constellation.[24] NASA foresees a single suit capable of supporting: survivability during launch, entry and abort; zero-gravity EVA; lunar surface EVA; and Mars surface EVA. On June 11, 2008, NASA awarded a $745 million contract to Oceaneering International to create the new spacesuit...