While human beings are known to be good at many different things, our ability in terms of pursuing constant progression tops them all. You see, when you are able to grow so consistently, you end up setting yourself up for some significant milestones along the way. Now, if we were to contextualize this by bringing in the milestones we have stumbled upon so far, we’ll be enlisting an expansive range of unique elements, but despite all the quality in play here, we still won’t anything as unique as technology. Technology is such an anomaly because it pushes us to do things that wouldn’t even seem possible without it. This expectantly plays a big role in expanding our boundaries over time, and when the said is dynamic is really what you are playing with, you become more than likely to see some by-products popping up into the picture. Talk about these by-products under the real-world setting, we have already witnessed plenty, and yet one of the bigger ones we saw was our space industry. There weren’t many people who found the idea of a full-fledged space industry as possible. However, once the wheels got moving, the whole jigsaw started to make sense, and before we could realize, we were thinking of going to the moon, mars, and what not. Interestingly enough, NASA’s latest announcement touches upon a crucial aspect of all these potential expeditions.
NASA has officially awarded two companies, Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace, with contracts to build next-generation spacesuits, which are now expected to make their debut with the agency’s Artemis program. According to certain reports, the contracts are worth a whopping $3.5 billion, but mind you, they are not guaranteed, therefore giving NASA the ultimate flexibility to pick and choose their partner/s moving forward. While the spacesuits surely headline this deal, it will also cover every other equipment that might be neccassary for spacewalking throughout the mission. To make sure the final product is as informed as possible; NASA will notably share critical fight and ground-based data from previous spacewalks and the agency’s own Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit development project. At the moment, we don’t have any specific details on the design of the stated spacesuits, except what we do know is that both the companies are leaning towards a modular, lightweight, and flexible construction.
“With these awards, NASA and our partners will develop advanced, reliable spacesuits that allow humans to explore the cosmos unlike ever before,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, “By partnering with industry, we are efficiently advancing the necessary technology to keep Americans on a path of successful discovery on the International Space Station and as we set our sights on exploring the lunar surface.”