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.
As the Axiom-2 crew prepares to take off to the International Space Station (ISS) in a few weeks from now, NASA is already looking ahead to the third private mission to the orbiting space station later this year, in a mission that will once again involve Axiom.
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.
NASA’s Artemis 1 mission may not have had real astronauts on board the Orion capsule, but there was an inanimate crew that went on the lunar trip.
It’s been more than 50 years since astronauts first left their dusty footprints on the lunar surface, but humanity is finally going back to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program. A lot has changed since the days of Apollo, which will likely be reflected in the new suits donned by those making the trip to the Moon…
Four astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, finally crossing through the space station’s hatch after ground teams troubleshooted a faulty sensor on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
Construction of the Tiangong Space Station was only completed late last year, but China already has big plans to expand on its low Earth orbit project.
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.
“I went silent,” Dwayne Fernandes told me. “I shut the hell up.” Fernandes, a double-amputee since the age of 11, was recounting his experience in weightlessness, having recently participated in a parabolic flight alongside a disabled research crew. The zero-g flight threw him into a deeply contemplative state, and as…
