NASA partners with Prada for new spacesuits

Prada will design and produce NASA’s lunar spacesuits for the Artemis III mission planned for 2025, which will also be the first lunar mission to place a woman on the Moon. In collaboration with Axiom Space, the architect of the world’s first commercial space station, the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit aims to ensure that the astronauts will be equipped with comfort and advanced capabilities during their moon exploration and for the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Prada’s engineers will work alongside the Axiom Space Systems team throughout the design process to develop materials and design features that will protect the astronauts against potential environmental threats while in space and in the lunar environment. Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada group marketing director, noted the company’s decades of experimentation and design will be applied to the design of NASA’s lunar spacesuits for the Artemis era.

The companies say that the new Axiom Space spacesuits draw upon NASA’s Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) spacesuit design and are an improved version of NASA’s suits that astronauts use for spacewalks. These are designed to be more flexible, provide better protection, and will have advanced tools that can enable the astronauts to experiment and explore the moon with greater ease. Details about these capabilities are yet to be announced. 

Source: designboom.com