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New Suits Signal a New Era of Space Travel
Public and Private stake their claim on “mobility” and “bespoke”
As recently as July of this year, there was reporting that NASA’s Artemis goal of 2024 might be delayed. Not because of launch or rocket tochnology, but because NASA hadn’t developed a new spacesuit that would meet the needs of the mission. Well, Amy Ross and her team must have been hard at work, as on October 15 we were introduced to the new generation xEMU and Orion crew suits that will be worn by the male, and female astronauts in the first crew to return to the Moon’s surface since 1972.
After much disappointment following the cancelled all-female spacewalk this summer, the Artemis mission suit has been unveiled the same week that astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir exited the ISS together to finally mark this milestone on October 18. One fundamental difference of the New Space Age, is the female representation. We not only have more female engineers, including Amy Ross, lead spacesuit engineer, but also the presence, and increasing numbers, of female astronauts.
