Skintight Spacesuit
Slim is in for the 2007 spacesuit season. Here, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Dava Newman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems, models a mock-up of a spacesuit designed to pressurize wearers like a snug Ace bandage without crumpling.
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Slim is in for the 2007 spacesuit season. Here, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Dava Newman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems, models a mock-up of a spacesuit designed to pressurize wearers like a snug Ace bandage without crumpling. Her latest prototypes exert the requisite pressures of 25 to 30 kilopascals, she reported last week at an international conference, but they still need work around the cuffs, which have to cinch shut without aid from any hard objects that might injure astronauts. Hoping to have a model ready for field testing within five years, she says the key to cuff closure might be special shape-memory alloys whose configurations change in response to heat.
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