And in the future astronauts could also be much more … fashion: large and formless pressurized coveralls will be replaced, to make way for much more comfortable and technological design garments.
Dava Newman, a researcher at MIT, has been working for a few years on the Bio Suit, a new concept suit able to maintain constant body pressure in the vacuum of space, using mechanical counterpressure method instead of pumps: BioSuit , presses directly on the astronaut’s skin.
This extraordinary result is achieved thanks to an intelligent fabric that unites the inextensible points of the body, that is the point whose relative position never changes even when one moves. The result is a high-tech garment, light and resistant, which frees the astronaut from a good part of the weight of the equipment necessary for survival.
The project is still in its initial phase: the prototype of the photo above is made of lycra, absolutely unsuitable for protecting the body from radiation and chemical agents. Understanding how to adapt it to high-tech fabric layers will still require numerous studies.