Axiom Space revealed its new Moon suit yesterday during an event held at NASA’s Space Center Houston. It’s the first Moon-specific suit since the Apollo era and a key component of NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks to return humans to the Moon later this decade. Here’s what we learned about the new suit, dubbed AxEMU.
Dubbed AxEMU, the next generation suit is designed to be safe, flexible, and capable of withstanding the extreme temperatures experienced at the lunar south pole, where two NASA astronauts are expected to land later this decade.
It’s been over 50 years since the final Apollo mission, but NASA’s ambitious Artemis program seeks to return humans to the lunar surface after that long absence. For that to happen, however, the space agency needs an updated Moon suit, the prototype of which will be revealed today.
Pesky lunar dust is an annoying obstacle for astronauts landing on the Moon—it sticks to pretty much everything. New research from Washington State University may have cracked the code for keeping space suits dust-free, in which pressurized liquid nitrogen was used to literally blow the dust from surfaces.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” President John Kennedy said famously in a 1962 speech.
