From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 362, a NASA project manager and a design engineer discuss the Orion Crew Survival System Suit that future Artemis crews will wear on their journeys to and from the Moon. This episode was recorded on Oct. 25, 2024.
Transcript
Host (Kenna Pell): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 362, “Suited for the Moon.” I’m Kenna Pell and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight and more. For more than 60 years, NASA spacesuits have evolved to fit the mission, whether it was the agency’s first human in space, first spacewalk, launches and landings on the space shuttle, or fast forward to the space station spacewalks of today. Each of these events came with suits tailored to fit the task at hand, and future missions to the Moon are no different.
In this episode, we dive into the Artemis Generation spacesuit, the Orion Crew Survival System suit, or OCSS for short. These are the spacesuits future Artemis crews will wear on their journeys to and from the Moon during launch and reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. We had the chance to sit down with the OCSS Suit Project Manager from NASA, Dustin Gohmert, and Dan Green, the design engineer with the David Clark Company. Here we learn about the requirement-driven design of these suits for trips to the Moon, the process and people it takes to fabricate them, and ultimately how spacesuits are more than suits. They’re essentially a personalized spacecraft, and safety is key. Suit up and let’s get to it.
[Music]
Host: Dustin, Dan, welcome to the show.
Dustin Gohmert: Hey, good morning, Kenna. Thanks for having us.
Dan Green: Good morning.
Host: Good morning. So we’ve got Dustin here from NASA and Dan here from David Clark Company to talk all things Orion Crew Survival System suits. Now, that’s a long name. I hope I’m saying it right, if I shorten it and say OCSS suits, is that right?
Dustin Gohmert: That’s kind of the colloquial term we use for it is OCSS. It just kind of organically sprouted up. It took us years to realize the acronym spelled something and then it just became what we called it.
Host: Okay. So throughout the show, if we say OCSS, we’re referring to the acronym that is OCSS, and that’s Orion Crew Survival System suits. Or actually, I’m sorry, that is Orion Crew Survival System. And then we’ll say suits. So OCSS suits. And then I was curious, you know, in short term ways to talk about the suits, do you guys ever say that or just to think of it like is this Orion’s flight suit, so to speak?
Dustin Gohmert: Yeah, I mean this will be the suit they launch in, that they land in. It serves a secondary, or primary purpose even as their survival suit. But it is the Orion suit, so to speak. It is the one and only they will wear for flight activities.
Host: Got it. Okay. So in short, like Dustin just said, these are the spacesuits for future Artemis crews that the wear on their journeys to and from the Moon during launch and reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. And so to set the stage here with our audience and give them an understanding of your backgrounds and how you all work together. Dustin, let’s go to you. Can you tell us about your background and your journey with getting to NASA and where you are now?
Dustin Gohmert: Sure. I grew up here in Texas, just south of Houston and in a little town called Cuero, adjacent to Victoria, kind of between the two of them. But went to school at UT and San Antonio and upon graduating, was fortunate enough to get a job at United Space Alliance and in there started in ’01. Kind of the pivotal point in my career was supporting the Columbia STS-107 flight. And that really changed everything at NASA. And after that, I had the opportunity to come over to NASA, NASA proper, as a civil servant. And I’ve kind of been working on really the lessons learned from Columbia and adapting them to suits, vehicle spacesuits, ever since then.
Host: And so what do you do now for NASA involving these suits? What is your day-to-day like?
Dustin Gohmert: Oh my gosh, there is no such thing as a day-to-day. So I’m the project manager for the OCSS system, for the vehicle. And keep in mind it includes more than just the suits. It’s also all the survival gear they would use post-landing and some vehicle mounted gear that’s used for emergency egress. But we keep busy, to say the least. We’re right now finishing up qualification testing for the suits. So after working with Dan and David Clark Company for so many years now in development of the suit, we’ve been collectively working on the qualification testing to prove it out. That’s wrapping up. As that wraps up, we’re starting to heavily work with the crew, the actual Artemis II crew, in terms of their training. We’re also working, in terms of training, with our team in terms of launch preparations for supporting the flights cause keep in mind, we’re not only an engineering hardware organization, but we are, I’d say a service organization in terms of personnel. So our team will go out and actually suit up the crew and support them and strap in and recovery post-landing. So there is no shortage of day-to-day activities. And really, it’s just kind of a new adventure every day really for us.
Host: Wow. Okay. So end-to-end services, from start to them getting in the spacecraft and upon return as well. And, I wanted to ask, well, I’m excited first of all to learn more about the training and all the things that you’re working on, and we’ll get to that a little bit later in the show. But you mentioned that NASA’s sort of leading the development of these suits, and of course you work very closely with Dan and the David Clark Company. And we’re curious, how did this partnership come to be?
Dustin Gohmert: Well, you know, so NASA’s worked with David Clark. Well, I’d say forever, that’s a little broad, but you know, since some NASA’s first missions, I mean Ed White went out in a David Clark suit, and they’ve been used through programs ever since then. So we had a strong relationship with David Clark. The suit that was worn in the shuttle was David Clark manufacturer. And so we actually had a very strong connection with this company, familiarity with the suit and the product. And when shuttle program ended, we had about 75 shuttle suits left over. And so we started tinkering with them, how could we advance them to the next level? And it was a really neat construct that we worked with David Clark Company in that we were able to, at NASA, take it, come up with conceptual designs. You know, we have a lot of folks who are very skilled at soft goods manufacturer as well. But we would take those old shuttle suits and modify them in certain ways, and then we’d meet with David Clark and say, “Okay, how can we turn this into a reality?” And so it was this continuous back and forth partnership over the years between brainstorming and in terms of concept and then in production. And the two really merged together over time to become what the OCSS suit is.
Host: And so, over to Dan, were you at the David Clark Company when you all were selected to support the OCSS suits? Or how long have you been there?
Dan Green: Yeah, I started at the David Clark Company in 2015. And at that time, we were already working with Dustin and his team at NASA on that modified ACES that he was just talking about. And eventually, as he said, that kind of morphed into the OCSS suit that we know today, where we’re really kind of making a new suit using lessons and some of the design aspects from the shuttle program and ACES to meet the needs of Orion and the Artemis program overall.
Host: Very cool. So you and Dustin have known each other a while, but want to ask, what do you do specifically for David Clark Company? How do you support the OCSS suits? And then kind of how I asked Dustin, and I know no day’s the same. Can you describe your “day-to-day” job?
Dan Green: Yep. Same as Dustin, definitely. No standard day-to-day. But I’m a design engineer here at David Clark. So I work on kind of all of the aspects of the development and production of the suits. Here we kind of separate the suits into hard goods and soft goods, so hard goods kind of being like helmet, any hardware disconnects, bearings, things like that. And then the soft goods where we’re talking about the fabrics. And personally, I spent a lot of my time working on the hard good side, specifically the helmet. So I kind of took the lead on designing and developing the helmet for the suit and developing a second size. We actually made a small size of the helmet and that was kind of one of my main projects for this suit. But I’m also involved on the soft goods side as well, since we’re a fairly small team, and so we need to integrate both the hard goods and the soft goods. And so we all kind of work together to make sure the suits are working together. And similar to Dustin, you know, my days can vary widely. Some days I’m kind of just at my computer working on a design in CAD and other days I’m getting into a suit here to do an evaluation for, you know, fit or mobility or something like that.
Host: Okay. And I don’t know if I asked you this, how did you get to David Clark Company? Where were you working before, or your background?
Dan Green: Yeah, so, I did my undergrad at Michigan Tech up in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Did mechanical engineering there. And then I went to the University of Colorado Boulder in 2012 and did my master’s in aerospace engineering. And from there, I was working in Colorado and then looking to kind of move to the East and found the David Clark Company had an opening and it worked out pretty well. And I’ve been there, like I said, since 2015.
Host: Now you said the East, where is David Clark Company located?
Dan Green: We are based in Worcester, Massachusetts, so central Massachusetts.
Host: Very nice. Okay. And so Dustin got a little bit into this, but can you explain the role of David Clark Company in supporting the OCSS suits?
Dan Green: Yeah, so we work very closely with Dustin and NASA on all aspects of the design development test evaluation of the suits. We do all of the fabrication and assembly here in Worcester or at our subsidiary, which is Air-Lock in Connecticut. And they make a lot of the hard good pieces, some of the pass-through hardware and risk disconnects and bearings and things like that. And then we also have a field operations group based in Houston that can provide onsite support as needed and go into JSC and help out with, with any of the things that they’re doing on site.
Host: Got it. Okay. And so, like Dustin mentioned, from the first American to walk in space in 1965, that was Ed White wearing a David Clark Company suit. Can you give us a little bit of information on the company’s history with working with NASA from back then to now?
Dan Green: Yeah, yeah. So David Clark has been providing suits to NASA, like we said, we like to say, since before they were NASA. Back when, when NASA was NACA in the early ‘50s, we were providing suits and life support equipment for the projects that they were working on back then. And since then, we’ve been providing suits and helmets and other life support equipment for every major crewed program since Gemini. And like Dustin said, Ed White was in on Gemini 4 was in a G4C, which is a David Clark suit. Through Apollo we were working on Apollo Block I, continued through Apollo in some communications hardware. We had three different suits on shuttle that were used during that full program and onto today we’re obviously working on the Artemis program on both the IVA OCSS suits and the EVA suits. Commercially, we were working with Boeing on their Starliner suits. So we’ve had a long history with NASA developing suits and it’s been a fun time.
Host: Okay. So going over to talk about kind of high level overview of the suit, over the decades, of course, NASA’s spacesuits, like you’re talking about, how evolved to fit the specific mission, right? So from that first spacewalk to, you know, building space station in low Earth orbit with shuttle and into now, Dustin, can you give us the high level overview of the OCSS suit? So high level, what is it and when is it worn?
Dustin Gohmert: Yeah, sure. You mentioned the evolution of the suits and the adaptation, and I think that’s key is physiologically all of these suits, you know, from these first ones in Gemini through now, were physiologically they do the same. The key is adapting to the mission and adapting to the vehicle and adapting to the needs of that we’re physically called to do during these missions. So in Orion specifically, we have a deep space mission. It’s much different than low Earth orbit, you know, 200 to 400, 500 miles high. In shuttle, we’re coming home as a relatively quick event. If something were to go wrong or even nominally with Orion, we have to be prepared to be, you know, a quarter million miles away. And we have to be prepared for contingencies in that case. So in the context of that, you know, consumption of resources is a key factor, and conservation of those resources is a key factor. So unlike low Earth orbit vehicles that can operate where gas is consumed and exhaled into the cabin, we have to recirculate, recycle, every molecule of gas on the vehicle. So it’s supplied to us, it’s given back to the vehicle, it’s scrubbed of carbon dioxide and reclaimed so that we can keep breathing it. That helps us manage our consumables, but it also helps us with the lessons we’ve learned from previous accidents such as Apollo 1, with the flammable cabin. It keeps us from expelling oxygen into the environment. We also have adapted this suit with lessons we learned from Columbia in terms of automation of the suit, and that it’s autonomously controlling the pressurized environment around the crew, and also have significantly enhanced it in terms of the protection features, in terms of coupling it with the seat and the vehicle, the analyses that we’ve done to keep the crew safe in landing or god forbid any mishaps. It’s very much been enhanced around all those key lessons that we’ve learned.
Host: So these are worn upon launch and reentry. And when can the crew take off the suits?
Dustin Gohmert: Generally, they’ll take off the suits once they arrive on orbit, and shuttle, the context as main engine cutoff was kind of the safe point where we could doff the suits. It will be similar to Orion. Now that being said there, you know, for Artemis II, we’ll get to orbit and we’re going to do a once around to check out systems, do a few different stress tests. For Artemis III and beyond, we will get into orbit and do what we call a trans-lunar injection very quickly after getting into orbit. So while the suits aren’t necessarily needed at that point, time doesn’t really exist to doff them. So even with that simple consideration in mind, we had to adapt them such that they’re functional in they’re fully suited, closed, sealed state, but also in an intermediate state for that launch activity that they could still function while partially clothed in the suits until such time exists that they can fully doff them and prepare them for long-term storage.
Host: Okay. And doff is the act of taking them off, right?
Dustin Gohmert: Yeah. Yes. Sorry. Well, we use a lot of NASA nerd words, so you’ll have to call me out when I go that far.
Host: Well, at least doff was not an acronym. Just the act of taking off the suits and you talked about stowing them. Where do they put them? There’s a spot in Orion?
Dustin Gohmert: Yeah.
Host: Well, obviously that’s a silly question. Where? I guess.
[Laughs]
Dustin Gohmert: Yeah. So Orion doesn’t have the luxury of space like shuttle did. Shuttle was huge in comparison but think it’s kind of a large camping trip in a large tent. And so the suits will be folded up neatly with all of their respective gear. They get stowed basically where the feet of occupants and seats three and four, the lower two seats in the vehicle, they’ll be stowed up there against kind of against the wall and they’re tucked behind a net. The key to this stowage though, is having them prepared in the case of an emergency. So it’s not just simply the act of, hey, let’s roll it up and put it there it is folded up with every single piece of ancillary gear needed in an emergency, all coordinated by crew member. All coordinated by order has to be donned in, don being the act of putting it on, for clarity. And so everything is meticulously stowed during that time to prepare just in case e events that might happen.
Host: Our listeners might have noticed, you know, that orange suit when they looked at our show graphic. And so when you look at the suit, the first thing you might notice is that orange color, which might remind you of the suits that the shuttle astronauts wore. And you had kind of alluded to that. And again, the Orion suit’s been enhanced from head to toe with improvements to those suits worn on the shuttle missions. But like we mentioned, it’s all about evolving to the mission and the design and engineering enhancements with these suits are, you know, really for the deep space exploration missions and Artemis and Dustin. Okay. The orange color. Can you tell us why?
Dustin Gohmert: Sure. There’s really only two colors, International Orange and a shade of fluorescent pink that don’t exist terrestrially naturally. And so the color is intended to be a survival means for the crew or more aptly, a recovery means for the rescue crew in case they were to ditch. So like I mentioned, we have the rafts as well in our OCSS system. So if the crew that lands in water, egresses into water, as cool as white or blue colors might look, we have a very hard time finding crew floating in the water in those colors. So the orange is a means of locating the crew should they egress the vehicle into the water.
Host: Got it. Okay. And what was the name you called it? What orange?
Dustin Gohmert: International Orange.
Host: Is that like an actual Pantone color or is that another NASA, did we—
Dustin Gohmert: No, actually, Dan, you might help me out here on the specs of how you guys buy the color. There is an actual NASA orange, International Orange is a more generic term, but I believe we do as an agency, have a specked out Pantone for NASA orange.
Dan Green: Yeah, I believe that’s correct. There is an actual color named International Orange.
Dustin Gohmert: And you know, in reality, you get as close as you possibly can as you’re creating the fabrics, even colors with the dyes and the particular types of specialty fabrics we work to, it’s not like doing something in print. It is getting it as close as possible that meets the needs.
Host: Got it. Okay. So talked about the orange color now going from head to toe. Dustin, can you tell us about the helmet?
Dustin Gohmert: I can. I will tell you, I feel a little remiss in talking about the helmet. The helmet’s kind of been Dan’s baby from beginning to end. But, you know, if you look at it, you would say that’s the shuttle helmet. And visually, it is strikingly similar. It is completely different. Because what David Clark was able to do was take the shape that we had become familiar with, that we had designed around and enhance it in so many ways in terms of strength, in terms of simplifying complexities that were problematic on the shuttle helmet, reducing the mass by a couple pounds. All of these things adding up to enhancements that greatly affect our ability to keep the crew safe.
Host: Okay. And so Dan, over to you. What can you tell us about the helmet?
Dan Green: Yeah, so as you know, Dustin mentioned, we started kind of with the overall general shape of the ACES helmet that was used in shuttle. And we were able to also take some of the other design aspects from some of the other helmets that we’ve made in the past and that we are currently making and kind of integrate them together into this new helmet for the OCSS suit.
Host: Okay.
Dan Green: We made some improvements on the materials and the fabrication methods for the shells. As Dustin mentioned, we simplified some of the mechanisms so that there were fewer parts and fewer failure mechanisms so that it was just a more robust system. The OCSS suit also goes to a higher pressure than what ACES did. And so we had to qualify and test this helmet to be able to withstand those higher pressures and work at those higher pressures. So there was a lot that went into it. And then as I mentioned earlier, we also then developed a smaller size to basically take that shape and that similar design make a smaller size to also help with crew protection for narrower shoulder crew members. This helmet has a narrower neck ring, and so the seat belts can be over their shoulders and not get pushed off to the side with a smaller helmet. And so a lot of the work was also making that smaller helmet, what size to make that smaller helmet to fit the whole range of crew members. And then also being able to use similar or the same hardware between helmets to limit the amount of different parts that we’d have to make.
Host: Got it. And thank you so much, Dan. Oh, over to you Dustin.
Dustin Gohmert: I think Dan brings up some fantastic points we really should highlight. That small helmet is the first of its kind that we’ve ever done. And logistics have always made it difficult to size for the smaller crew members. Because, you know, the suit being soft goods can be shaped to anybody size relatively easy, but historically and logistically, the hard goods stayed the same size. And so you struggle when you have a very tiny suit with a very large helmet on the persons. And we saw injuries associated with that in the Columbia accident. And so with this opportunity to build this new helmet using updated manufacturing techniques, computerated drafting that Dan was able to do, we had hoped originally it was simply hit the button and say shrink 10%. It wasn’t quite that simple, but the end result came out to that. And it’s really enhanced our ability to fit the range, really any range, of astronaut possible. So we’re talking the first percentile female all the way to the 99th percentile male that we can now accommodate without compromises. And it’s kind of exciting to be able to do that cause it’s something we’ve never been able to really do before.
Host: That is so cool. And, you know, on the same topic of going through from head to toe of this OCSS suit and all about the enhancements, Dustin, can you tell us a little more about the enhanced communication system?
Dustin Gohmert: I’ll start and I’ll let Dan add to it. The the comm system is really one of the things about deep space is it’s very difficult to employ complex electronics once it gets beyond the Van Allen Belt with the radiation exposure that we have. So in all honesty, a lot of times simplicity and reliability is the key in these factors. With this comm system, we did update it with modern and state-of-the-art microphones, earphones. But one of the things we also had to do was enhance the hearing protection associated with it. And so if you were into a launch and went into a launch abort, keep in mind those abort motors are right over the top of the capsule and the plumes come down and actually impinge on the sides of the Orion capsule creating just this dramatically cacophonous den in the cabin upwards approaching almost 140 decibels. And so that’s not just sound that you feel, that’s sound that actually shakes you down to your bones. So with that, we’ve actually taken the comm cap and employed internal in the ear hearing protection as well as over the ear comm. And we had to do that because of the different situations this comm system is used in. So for launch, I need that enhanced hearing protection, but for deep space survival and when we get to it, we’ll talk about that, it could last up to six days in the suited context, in the ear hearing, in the ear comm is not really practical. It would become painful. It would become potentially contaminated with ear byproducts. And so we made it so it’s kind of a dual use, you can use either or in the context that you need to use it in.
Host: Okay. You know, you’d mentioned you had about 75 leftover, you know, suits from shuttle missions and they were kind of off-the-shelf size, like you mentioned, you know, helmet wise at least. And with making the new suits, you’re able to make the shoulders more narrow and fit that wide range of different sizes. Can you tell us about the enhancements to mobility when it comes to, you know, resizing shoulders and other parts of the suit?
Dustin Gohmert: Absolutely. So you talked about the leftover shuttle suits, and we started, this project started with modifying those ACES suits. And we actually did demonstrations with them at the NBL, the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, doing microgravity style EVAs, to really understand could this suit be used? And we believed it could, because again, it goes back to that suit, that this is a distant relative in terms of years, but really not in terms of the design to what Ed White wore back in Gemini. And so he said if it was done before, it should be able to be done again, operate in microgravity. And we proved that it could, but we also acknowledged there could be some enhancements. So as we looked at these things, we said, “What is the current mission?” The current mission is to be able to survive in the capsule and perform the operations needed for survival for six days.
The trick though, with land suits that are used for launch and landing, landing is the key. So landing requires you to be coupled to these seats very tightly in the seat belts with really nothing between your body and that seat other than the soft goods. And that’s critical to prevent blunt force injuries or decoupling from the seatbelts, which would compromise you. So we knew we couldn’t enhance the mobility universally by simply adding bearings to it. That works very well on the EVA suit, the EMU, that works very well on planetary suits, but in our context it didn’t. So the thought was, well, how do we give them the functionality they need in a more simplistic manner. And simple as relative term, I’ll say. But we worked very heavily, we iterated probably with David Clark for, oh, shoot, three, four, five years on how to tweak the shoulders in particular, shoulders being an extremely complex joint to build in a spacesuit, but modified them so that they one, were more narrow. But if you were to take off the cover of the suit, you would see the patterning of how they’re sewn into the body really closely mimic the patterning of the advanced EVA suits, the one Axiom and David Clark are working on. And it allows the shoulders to point forward into your work zone. And when you think about it in the pressurized context, where do my shoulders need to be? They need to be pointing my arms into my work zone. They don’t necessarily need to be off to the side. They don’t need to be up, they don’t need to be behind me. So we used kind of the KISS principle to make the suit functional, but also in terms of its mobility needs, but also make it operational for all the landing needs.
You really have to consider just the vast amount of roles the suit has to do. No one aspect can be perfect, but what we strive for is the perfect balance of features that allow it to do all the different mission needs. So we, you know, with those shoulders, we then worked with David Clark. They had some very interesting patterns they had developed for the elbows. The elbows are now effectively zero torque even at pressure. And of course, the wrist strings are identical to shuttle suits. And the cool thing is those are going to be one of the few heritage items on the OCSS suit that actually came from shuttle program, no kidding. That hardware that has been to space and shuttle will be carried forth in Orion on the OCSS suits. But with that, we have zero torque elbows, zero torque wrist and I think later maybe we can talk about the gloves, but the gloves have been enhanced for mobility and robustness. So when you think about it in space, we don’t focus on leg mobility. There’s nowhere to walk in microgravity. You walk with your hands. And so most of the attention was put into the arms, and the rest of the posture was to adapt the suit to what we call a zero G posture. When your body naturally takes that shape, we made the suit take that shape. We figured why fight it.
Host: You know, I like how you had mentioned that, and I believe this is what you meant with the keeping it simple kind of principle. You know, you’re not going to be walking. So kind of focusing on the upper part of the suit. And one thing you mentioned that there’s pretty much just soft good in between you and the seat. And so while we’re on this topic, I wanted ask, and how is the fully integrated with the Orion vehicle?
Dustin Gohmert: Well, the seat is the piece that’s between us, physically. There’s of course the environmental controls integrations, but let’s focus on the seat integration and the person. In shuttle, the seat was relatively simplified and it, you know, it was mounted to the floor with some cargo fitting attachments and then stowed away. But with Orion, you know, shuttle was a wheeled landing vehicle. So the context of landings weren’t all that rough, even in the case of a runway mishap. But Orion, you can think about it and maybe not the most glamorous way, but as a controlled crash, we are coming into the ocean at a relatively high speed under chutes and each time the occupants are going to be exposed to these landing forces. So with that, we spent, really that was my first exposure in Orion, was working on the seats. We spent a lot of time looking at lessons learned from ejection seats from the military, from helicopters, but also the racing industry and learning principles of how to restrain a crew member and adapt it around their bodies. That the challenge though came back to that first to 99th percentile person. So, you know, and I’ll take the racing industry for example. You have a simple soft, also fire-resistant suit between you and the seat, but that seat’s custom built to you. We don’t have that luxury in Orion. Also, that seat is one single piece in Orion. It has to be taken apart because, you know, your transportation to space, your taxi ride, then becomes your tent that you live in. So the seat has to be taken down. So configurability was key along with occupant protection. And so really, the benefit we had with this that was so unique in starting this project from scratch in terms of the Orion, was we were able to design the suits and the seats simultaneously around each other to blend them together. So working with David Clark, working with Lockheed, and as features evolved, you know, one change in one would lead to, hey, can we adapt this other one? And we would find a way to meet in the middle to create that ultimate compatibility for restraint of the occupants.
Host: So cool. And I like the comparisons to the racing industry. And can you tell us now about the new adaptable interfaces?
Dustin Gohmert: Sure. So with within the seat, so we have, going back to the anthropometric of the crew, I mentioned first to 99th percentile persons. And usually when we throw that out for simplicity of discussion, we’ll talk about stature or height, and that just for putting people’s mind, that’s a female, that’s about 4’9” tall to a male that’s a little bit over 6’6” tall. So this huge disparity in sizes, but stature is actually our only useless metric, honestly. We look at every individual body size. So we’re interested, how long is your thigh, how long is your shin? How broad are your shoulders? You know, your forearm length, your upper arm length, your neck length, eye height as you’re seated to match them to the display console. So every little aspect is looked at.
So as we put the persons in the suit, the first thing that’s done is take each one of those individual measurements. And that’s the beauty of the OCSS that David Clark has been able to work with us is we can take their exact measurements and make it fit them perfectly, but then that perfect fit suit needs to go into a seat that also fits perfectly. So the seat is designed in this modular context where we can actually take parts off, say for example, a shoulder restraint. If you are a first percentile female, we would give you a smaller breadth shoulder bolster pair than say the largest males. In the context of, say, Artemis II, for example, Christina (Koch) would get a smaller size shoulder bolster than say Jeremy (Hansen) would, we custom tune it to them. We can also shift the seat, the support for the buttocks up and down. We can adjust each one of these sections of their leg individually to their particular stature. And keep in mind, the seats in Orion are recumbent, meaning we’re laying on our back. And there’s reasons for that due to acceleration exposure and microgravity effects. But when you lie on your back, your body also takes a very different shape than sitting upright. Things that say sitting in your office chair, you don’t realize it, but your butt effectively splays out somewhat. But when you lay back in a seat and pull your feet back in somewhat of a recumbent position, recumbent, but also somewhat fetal position, everything leans out, yet your shoulders broaden as you’re lying on your back. And so we had to take each one of those into context as we adapted, hey, here’s lessons of normal anthropometry, but now apply them to this unique context of recumbent seated anthropometry and adapt and customize it to each person. And with that, we took all those features and now we can create a cocoon effectively around their body to protect them from forward and lateral loads. And we can also adjust the seat belts, particularly to fit each person precisely. Not a one size fits all, or even one size kind of, sort of, really fits none. We fit them absolutely precisely for their protection.
Host: And so Dustin is super passionate about the OCSS suits but you’re also passionate about the storytelling. We’ve had you out for a lot of our public engagement events around town. And I’m just curious, what suit are you in? You’re in an OCSS suit, but what form or what size or what is the difference in the suit that you’re wearing out, you know, to share the story of the OCSS suits than the ones obviously that you all are creating for the crew?
Dustin Gohmert: Yeah. So a lot of the ones that we take out for the public expositions, obviously we can’t take our actual suits that we’ll be going into space out for activities like that. They’re environmentally controlled, but also to keep them in proper controlled condition for the crew. A lot of those suits are actually those shuttle suits that were left over. And so physically the similarities, especially when unpressurized, the similarities allow us to basically modify them in a way such that they represent the functions and look of the OCSS suit. And in those, we use them for a lot of our training as well, training that might be say, post-landing training for water survival. We obviously don’t want to take our flight suits and before flights, submerge them in the pool and soak them. But we can take these old suits and I’ll just say some of the more rough and tumble activities we use those for and for a lot of our public affairs events. So, with those, we had standard sizes that David Clark generally makes we, you say a large tall or large long suit that would generally be, say for example, the size that I would wear. But in Orion, those sizes don’t exist. In Orion, for the OCSS suit, it will be a custom suit, it will be a Reid Wiseman suit and a Victor Glover suit, and a Christina Koch suit, and a Jeremy Hansen suit. It will be built to their unique anthropometry, to fit them perfectly to accommodate them for that long-duration exposure inside the suits. Fortunately, I end up being one of those sizes, so I get to spend a lot of time in them as well.
Last year, we took the suits. We went to a recovery exercise, a naval base San Diego for Orion recovery. And while we were there, Comic-Con was going on, and San Diego Comic-Con is like the Comic-Con. And so cosplay, you don’t get in the door if you’re not cosplaying, basically. And so, NASA JPL had a booth there, and they invited us to, to come. We had suits. So we brought our suits, and it was fun. While we were in the booth, in the NASA booth, everybody was like, “Wow, that’s amazing. That suit is so cool.” And then, you know, we’d go out and I was wearing it. We’d kind of stroll around the facility, and once you left the NASA booth, people kind of eyeball you up and down. They’d be like, I guess that’s an alright costume.
[Laughs]
Host: Right, oh that’s funny. No, we love it. Thanks for coming out to support all those things. Of course, I’m on the public affairs side, and so we love having y’all out. I want to say thanks for explaining the first through 99th, right? So 4’9” female to say 6’6” or above, you know, male. I’m right there in about the 4’11 3/4’” side, but anyway.
[Laughs]
Dustin Gohmert: We have a suit for you.
Host: Okay. Over you Dan. And last question on the topic of the enhancements to the suit. Can you tell us about the gloves?
Dan Green: Yeah, I can tell you about the updated gloves for the OCSS. So we’ve made a quite a bit of updates since the shuttle gloves. We obviously started there. As Dustin has mentioned previously, the general point of the gloves is still the same, but we’ve been able to make some enhancements in how we’ve fabricate the gloves and the materials used in the gloves. One of the first things that we had to do, and I mentioned this previously with the helmet as well, is that the suit is going to a higher pressure. And so we had to make sure that these gloves are robust to that higher pressure and add some different methods to make the restraint layer stronger and able to handle those higher pressures. And so that was one of the major things.
And the glove is a really interesting part of the suit because it’s similar in construction in the layers, but it’s so much smaller, and so it’s a lot more difficult to fabricate from that standpoint, getting in there with all these tiny seams, many rows of stitching, things like that. So it is a challenge to get in there and make some of these, you know, updates. And it’s been a fun project to go through and we’ve come out with really, a great glove. One of the other things that we added is touchscreen ability. So we have some few of the fingers have touchscreen fabric on the outside so that they can use the touchscreen inside the vehicle. And then internal to the glove, we’ve actually made updates to the material for the bladder of the glove. So we did some testing, found that with the amount of cycles and uses that the glove would be going through, that we needed to make it a little bit more robust. And so we went through and found a new material that would make the bladder from that was a little more robust. So we have, you know, more robust bladder, stronger restraint for higher pressures, and then that touchscreen ability and all that kind of comes together for this, you know, from the outside. It looks pretty similar to a shuttle glove, but there’s a lot of updates to make it a much more enhanced glove.
Host: I think that’s so cool. The new need of having touchscreen availability with the gloves, whereas on shuttles, mainly switches and things like that. That is so cool. And, Dan, you know, this is not all about what the suit can do. It’s also about the abilities of the people who make them. So over to you with David Clark Company, and once you have a prototype, what is the next step you all do in making the suit?
Dan Green: Yeah, so we don’t really have any off-the-shelf suits, right? So we always start with what the requirements for that mission or that program or that vehicle, and then we start with the development of concepts and go from there. One of the things that Dustin has kind of mentioned previously here is this, one of the driving requirements is a 144-hour contingency case, so that’s six days where potentially the crew could be inside their suit and pressurized while they’re going out and around the Moon, and then coming back home if something went wrong. And that requirement, that contingency case drove a lot of the design decisions for this suit specifically. And so there’s a lot of testing and evaluation of, you know, different ideas, different materials to see what works best. Sometimes we’ll just make one small section of the suit and test that on its own and do more detailed tests before we actually incorporate that into the full suit. So we kind of have this, you know, cyclical process of coming up with some designs, testing them, adding them to the whole suit, doing some more tests. And then really once we come up with a kind of baseline, you know, we have to do our pattern grading, which is coming up with all the different sizes of the patterns. So we’ll have, you know, one pattern for, you know, the front of the arm, but that has to be many different sizes. And for this suit specifically, that is done once we actually get measurements of the crew. As I said, we do a lot of tests and design updates. After we do the tests, we get some data from our tests, we’ll go back and make our designs better, and then we’ll test that again. And once we have gone through that and made sure that we can meet all of these requirements that we started with, then we can go through and start looking at all of the tests that we need to perform to show and prove that we meet all of those requirements. And that’s where we get into qualification and that’s what Dustin was talking about there. They’re working on finishing up right now. So right now, we’ve been going through doing all these tests on the suit, gathering data to prove that we can meet all of these requirements. And then once we show that we meet all those requirements so we can start getting into production based off of our finalized drawings and prints.
Host: Got it. Okay. So once you’re in production, are the suits made by hand and what equipment is needed to assemble them?
Dan Green: Yeah, so all of our suits are made by hand. We make small quantities of these. We’re not, you know, we’re not making thousands and thousands of the spacesuits, unfortunately not yet. So, it doesn’t really make sense to have a big production line of machines. So we have people here that are stitching these by hand that are assembling the suits by hand. So we start out with marking and cutting patterns. And so we have people who roll out the fabric and lay a pattern down and mark it and cut out the patterns, and then they go to our stitchers and everything gets stitched up. We have a ceiling department, cementing department, where they make sure that the in internal gas container layer is airtight. We have a machine shop where we can machine hardware, and then we have an area where we’re assembling all these pieces together, lacing, screwing hardware together, things like that.
Host: Thanks for explaining that kind of high-level process. And it sounds like there’s a lot of people on your team that contribute to the as assembly of just a single suit. Could you guess how many people you think are helping on just one single suit?
Dan Green: Yeah, we have approximately 50 people in our aerospace life support systems group here in Worcester, from engineers to stitchers and other technicians on our production floor. And then we also, as I mentioned earlier, have that small team of engineers down in Houston that can help with some of the onsite activities as well.
Host: So cool to think that pretty much, I would say most of 50 folks have their hands on, you know, part of history that’ll go back to the Moon for the first time since Apollo. So that’s exciting. Back to a little bit of the basics here. I wanted to know, are there any special fabrics or thread or maybe sewing machines and are they sourced from somewhere special?
Dan Green: Yeah, so the materials are really selected again to kind of meet those requirements, whether that’s the special fabrics or the special threads. So, you know, we’ll look at the strength of the fabric or its flammability, weight rating, the wear resistance, things like that to make sure that it’s going to meet all of those requirements. We’ll also look at some, you know, comfort, and, you know, kind of the weight of the fabric to make sure that it’s not going to be too warm or things like that.
We do have a lot of different sewing machines. We have a lot of different operations that use many different types of sewing machines. I wouldn’t necessarily say that they’re sourced specifically from one special place, but we have a lot of different machines for specific operations. You know, as I mentioned earlier, those gloves are a very small part that have very precise stitching. And so we need to make sure that we have machines that are able to do that. We also have machines that can stitch through many layers of very thick webbing with really big thread. And so we have, you know, many different parts of the suit that require different tools and so we need to have all those available to us to complete the suit. And then one other special material that David Clark has been using since the beginning is a material, that David Clark himself actually developed in the 1940s. And that’s called Link-Net. And that is a kind of special weave that he created that allows for really good unpressurized comfort. So when the crew is wearing the suit, 99% of the time it’s very comfortable, but then if they had to pressurize, it allows for mobility and we’ve developed special Link-Net machines that allows to fabricate that. And we use that in the suit today in a few places, in the shoulders, we talked about the mobility in the shoulders, and that’s one area that we use the Link-Net to make sure that they have enough mobility there when they’re pressurized.
Dustin Gohmert: It’s so interesting, for all the work that Dan and David Clark go through with finding this material that has a certain property that does a certain thing, then we have to bring it back and test it for off-gassing. And what if we find out, oh my God, it emits some kind of chemical that Orion can’t scrub, um, back to the drawing board. Or how do we modify it? And some of the materials we have to actually put in an oven and cook out some of the, I’ll say the nasties in the chemicals to allow it to go onto the vehicle. Nothing as simple about these processes.
Host: Very cool. So say one of our listeners, you know, makes their own clothing or cosplays and they want to go, you know, professional makes spacesuits for a living. What types of skills would they have in, you know, already making their own clothing and costumes that would transfer over to what you all do?
Dan Green: Yeah, there there’s no really perfect checklist of skills. You know, we like to have people with a lot of different backgrounds and different skills. Obviously, you know, if somebody enjoyed making their own clothing or things like that, they’re kind of already on the right path. You know, we obviously have requirements and technical needs, so, you know, you have to be able to look at an engineering drawing and be able to read through some of our fabrication documentation to make sure that you are understanding the exact steps and tolerances and things like that. But a lot of the skills, you know, are kind of just what they would already have to like to make their own clothing or build their own cosplay costumes. We’ve developed that into a more technical aspect.
Host: Got it. Okay. So over to kind of safety and training topic with the suits. And, I wanted to ask, back over to Dustin. Are there any specific measures to help with increased exposure to radiation within these suits?
Dustin Gohmert: Well, radiation is kind of tricky. So radiation is really only blocked via dense materials. And honestly, the suit is none of these, you know, in terms of spaceflight mass is king. And we have to work to keep it as light as possible. The other thing we have to do is really focus on mass of these suits in terms of allowing for terrestrial mobility of the crew. So while we have to function in space, or mass or weight doesn’t really matter, we have to be able to egress the vehicle in an emergency on the launchpad or post-landing. So there’s really not ability to incorporate ultra dense radiation shielding materials. But what the crew would do is there are procedures in place that for basically sheltering place in the vehicle, wherein they would stack different materials of higher density in the direction of the radiation exposure and then simply put huddle behind it for the duration of the exposure.
Host: Okay. And we talked about this a little bit earlier, but could you explain how the suit can act as a personal spacecraft in a case of depressurization?
Dustin Gohmert: Yeah. I think that’s really what makes spacesuit so special and to the designers and to the users and to the public is the personalness of it. And in this case, it really can be thought of as your own personal spacecraft. It is providing you the same life support capabilities that the vehicle has on a much more individual level. And so it is giving you that pressure. It is giving you that airflow. It is removing your carbon dioxide, it’s managing you thermally. And it has to allow you to do these tasks that are needed to be accomplished. But keep in mind, in the spacecraft, you have a considerable amount of volume around you to move with freedom of mobility. You know, the full tactileness of your hands, the full range of motion, your full vision, all of this is restricted while you’re in the spacesuit. It’s your own, it’s your personal spacecraft. But it is. I joke with people when they get in the suit, are you claustrophobic? And they’re like, I don’t know. I’m like, well, you’re about to find out. Because it’s your home is now about an answer two bigger than your body, and that is where you’re living in for the next few days in this suit. So while we have to manage, you know, providing for aspects of hypobaric protection, that is low pressure, you know, keeping you from going hypoxic, that is losing ability to metabolize the oxygen in the air. So we do that via putting pressure in the suit. We do that via elevating the oxygen levels in the suit in our case to a hundred percent. Because we’re always struggling with this balance of how low of pressure can we go to allow you to be mobile, but how high a pressure do we need to keep you physiologically safe inside the suit.
With that, we have different pressure regimes. Dan mentioned that this is a higher pressure suit than we’ve ever gone to before. And this suit can actually function at eight PSI versus with a shuttle function at three and a half PSI and PSI is pounds per square inch, for our listeners. When you think about it in context, your car tire’s about 30 PSI. So when I say eight, you’re like, eh, that’s not that much. But think about how many square inches are in this suit. It is a huge amount of surface area and pressure acts over every one of those square inches. So that pressure room results in a tremendous amount of force on the suit both in terms of how do we build this suit so it’s strong enough to tolerate that, but also how do we pattern the suit to allow them to move and function while they’re at those pressures or those forces acting on their body that, you know, solving that part. Then you come to, well, how do I keep you physiologically alive with your other body functions? Because breathing is not the only thing we do as humans. You know, we have to eat, we have to drink. And then there’s byproducts of those too, with urination and defecation. And those are not the glamorous parts of spaceflight, but that is the reality of spaceflight is humans are still humans and they will be human inside of that suit.
And so, you know, one of the enhancements of the helmet we didn’t speak of was we now have a drink port in it. We can pass a straw that will have either their water or, say a protein style shake, or even medication through the helmet, while at vacuum, for them to consume. But inside the suit, we have a relatively sophisticated waste management system for long-term exposures that allows the urine to be basically transported through the barrier of the suit and overboard into space wherein it will. I joke that you’re going to make pee-cicles because it will instantly freeze once it hits the vacuum of space. And then over time, sublimate off into gas. That’s one thing, getting the urine out, but the fecal content isn’t quite as simple. And in the simplest terms, we will be wearing a custom fit bag that collects it for several days while isolating it as much as possible from the body to prevent infection. And therein comes the, you know, I mentioned that we can take medications through the port. There is no perfect answer to this. This is more extreme than anything that really anyone has ever attempted, surviving in this kind of isolation where you can’t even scratch an itch. Keep that in mind. I mean, if your nose itches, you’ve just got to tough it out. Everything is off limits from you. So it has to be set up and perfect as you get in that suit and accommodate every possible need. And that’s quite the challenge. And it’s even more the challenge when you think about it now than Apollo. Apollo was all male astronauts and honestly all relatively about the same size test pilots. But with the anthropometric range we deal with and now males and females, it’s so exciting to be able to solve these problems across that entire range. And there’s very different solutions, as you can imagine, to some of these internal aspects that I’m talking about.
Host: I thought it was really interesting that, I think it was, Dan mentioned, you know, that 144-hour, six-day contingency case where you do, you have to have the spacesuit act as a personal spacecraft, right? That kind of drove a lot of the requirements when enhancing this for deep space exploration missions on Artemis. And so real quick, did you have anything to add on improved thermal management of the suit?
Dustin Gohmert: Well, yeah, sure, let’s talk about that. The suit in itself is made of a membrane, the pressure ceiling membrane is, honestly, it’s a material that we are all familiar with. It’s a breathable membrane, Gore-Tex. And that that’s great for helping us manage heat load. It allows the moisture of our bodies to permeate through the membrane while containing the oxygen. That’s a critical aspect of how we manage the thermal loads in the suit. That’s really unique about this suit versus other suits that are out there that are made of a urethane-coated nylon. That’s only one aspect of it. Cause at the end of the day, you’re still inside of a sealed bag, so to speak. So there’s no wind to blow on your body to cool you. If you do overcome the permeability of that membrane and start to build up a sweat load, a heat load, metabolically speaking, we’re always generating heat. How do we control that? So one aspect that Orion has is kind of a cool trick we’ve employed is liquid cooling. And so under the suit, they wear a garment that has very small tubes, about one 16th inch diameter that zigzag over the entirety of your torso at several hundred feet of tubing when you add it all up together, but over your torso and your arms, it’s a shirt, but it’s a shirt with enormous amount of tubes. And through these tubes, we pump chilled water. And the Orion vehicle uses its radiators and its cold plates. We flow the water over those cold plates and basically use that as our energy transfer, heat transfer mechanism, to cool the water for the crew. So it’s kind of the symbiotic relationship between the crew and the vehicle in terms of, I’m taking heat from this spot, I’m putting it over here where I need it, and I’m removing the heat over here and giving that cold water back to you. So with that, we’re able to adjust the temperature of the crew. We also have a valve built into the suit on the leg, or that allows for the crew members to individually adjust their temperature of the water that flows to them or more accurately adjust the flow rate of that water. So each person has their own kind of microclimate that they can build for themselves.
Host: Man, I know living in Houston, it would be so nice to have a tight fitting, you know, suit that had cool water running through it. But, Dan, when your team is fabricating the suit, how do you maintain an airtight seal when you’re putting together all those layers?
Dan Green: Yeah, so we have, you know, obviously some special materials like, as Dustin mentioned, the Gore-Tex material that’s kind of inherently airtight. But obviously we have some seams and we do stitch those seams, but then we also go back over and seal over those to make sure that where those seams are, are also airtight. And then in the areas like where the air flows in or out of the suit where we have some hardware passing through, we use, you know, clamp rings and have like some ceiling ribs to help really clamp down all of the layers of the suit and make sure that it’s airtight. And then in the back of the suit where we’re, I’ll use the words that doesn’t use before, donning and doffing the suit, we have the pressure ceiling closure, which is basically the big long zipper at the back of the suit. And that zipper has rubber faces that as you zip it together, those rubber faces seal together and make sure that that that is all fully sealed and holding air.
Host: Back to you, Dustin. You know, you’d mentioned at the top of this conversation that there’s so much that goes in the suit. There’s even a survival, a suite of survival gear equipped within it. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Dustin Gohmert: Sure. There’s survival equipment on the suit, but there’s also a much larger survival suite of hardware that’s ancillary to the suit that we provide to the crew. So next to the side hatch of Orion, we have a four-man life raft that can be thrown out that the crew can egress the vehicle, climb into the life raft for long duration survival. But there’s also a couple of survival kits. And in those kits is things like radios to call back to rescue forces water. Obviously, the water in the ocean is not drinkable, so we provide a considerable amount to the crew, but also medical supplies. But beyond that, we also realize that when bad days happen, they’re really bad days. Quite often in spaceflight, the things we imagine in the context, we would imagine them in are never quite how it works out. So we plan on Murphy joining the party, and saying, “Well, what if they didn’t make it to that life raft?” And so keep in mind the crew, when they land, are very physiologically compromised from long-duration spaceflight. Your body comes home effectively severely dehydrated cause in space, your blood floats up into your torso. Your body says, I’m hypovolemic, or I have too much blood. And it metabolizes you actually process it, urinate it out. So, they suffer from a phenomena called orthostatic intolerance, meaning low blood pressure due to standing in the simplest terms. And it’s severe enough. If you’ve ever stood up real quick and fed felt your head kind of dizzy, it’s that. But imagine that extreme enough that you actually pass out. And so inside the suit, one of the things we do to enable them to function in a survival scenario is we have extraordinarily tight garment that’s worn around the legs. When they return, I call them my panty hose. I’ve had to wear them continuously for six days to qualify them. But they kind of think of maybe recovery stockings like an athlete would wear, but much, much, much tighter. I joke that it would be easier to cut off my foot to pull these things off, than to actually peel them off. They’re so tight, but that allows them to be mobile and egress the vehicle in an emergency case. Then inside the suit, should we get to the vehicle, should we get to the raft, or not, we have integrated life preserver units that the crew will inflate upon entering the water. But one of the coolest things that we have is the signaling equipment built into the suit.
And on that life raft, we actually have a beacon that’s really the first of its kind. They’re at currently about to gain nationwide certification, but imagine a GPS that is supplemented beyond just GPS with additional satellites that have been up on orbit for a while now. But this will be the first time we’re able to use them. So even without GPS signal, we can locate the crew now within a hundred feet, within the first minute, and within about five minutes, we can locate them within about five feet. And each person has this no matter where they are in the world that is active. And then beyond that, we have a survival suite or signaling suite that we wear in the suit that has to, you know, simple things, but very functional things, whistles, signal mirrors. If there was one piece of equipment that any aviator would tell you if it was the only thing I could take, it’s that signaling mirror because it’s infallible. And it works. And so each one of these items is on each and every crew member to enable them just in case, no matter what happens, we’ve tried to think about that next step of what they would do in terms of making sure they get home safe.
Host: And how does the crew train to use these suits? Have they warned them to train on any emergency situations like exiting Orion after splashdown, maybe here at the NBL, the Neutral Buoyancy Lab?
Dustin Gohmert: Absolutely. So the crew is going to train for every aspect of the mission, of course, and nominal aspects. But we also spend considerable amount of time training for emergency situations or contingency situations. So there are specific classes that we will put the crew in suits. Sometimes it’s the ones I call the modified ACES, the rough and tumble suits, and sometimes it’s the actual, no kidding, pressurized suits, depending on the context of the scenario. So say for water egress, we would put them in some of the modified ACES, the cruder suits, but we’ve enhanced their robustness to be able to do it again and again and again to keep training them for how do I egress the vehicle into the water to ingress my raft? What if I’m on the launch pad and there’s a pad emergency called, and I would have to leave the capsule and go to the escape baskets. Each one of those is trained methodically down to, hey, you step here, you step here, you’re putting your hand on the hatch right now, opening it while I equalize this valve. Everything is methodically thought out by our training folks at Johnson and also in cooperation with our partners at the launch facilities at Kennedy as well. And so the rescue forces also come and trained with the crew on this is how you would be extracted in case of an emergency. And then for long things like long-duration survival in the capsule, that that gets really unique cause keep in mind the zero gravity chamber that people think we have, we don’t actually have, surprise. And so if you were to pressurize a suit in the vehicle and say, hey, practice, well, you’re just going to kind of lay there as this big pressurized blob, so to speak, because you don’t have the benefit of microgravity to float around in. And so how do you do that? And in the context, we have to break up the training into finite segments, okay, from this part, I need you to learn this aspect of the lesson from this part. I need you to learn this aspect of the lesson, and we’ll break it up into small chunks. But the totality of all those gives them the overall concept of how to perform in those very unique environments.
Host: Okay. I feel like I could talk about this and learn. There’s so much to learn about these suits and we could have a six-day, 144-hour, you know, conversation about it. Seriously.
Dustin Gohmert: I think so, yes.
Host: No, this has been awesome. I have a few questions here in closing. So, you know, Dustin, how do you envision the OCSS suits evolving for say, future missions to Mars?
Dustin Gohmert: One of the interesting things about this project that we had, the extreme benefit, and it was so cool to be able to take this and really work the project not only from a requirement standpoint, but as a team that’s passionate about the suit, passionate about the crew and their survival, work in enhancements that enabled future extensibility of the suit. So how do we make it future proof, so to speak? What can we do to not only solve the problems for this mission for Artemis II, but any possibilities that come up there later? So a lot of those mobility features were built in a lot of the robustness, a lot of adaptability, on how we connect to different vehicles, supply sources for gas. And so it really has been designed to be adaptable to not only Orion, but if we were to get off Orion into Gateway, for example, or get out of Gateway into the Human Lander System, we have the ability to take that suit and adapt to those different vehicle context and ensure there may be minor tweaks along the way, but the basis of the suit, the core of it that we’ve qualified, is there and ready for that. And even today, we are exploring possibilities with some of our commercial partners on putting this suit on some of the lunar landers as not only the suit that we launch and land terrestrially in, but launch, land and then launch from the Moon in. And I think that’s really exciting to think about using the suit in so many contexts. Along the way, we also, you know, designed a thermal micrometeoroid garment. So the white cover layer you see on the EMU, it could be adapted, one could be built and put on the suit, say on the way to Mars. I had an issue that had to be dealt with, right here, we have a basis of design that we can build from. And honestly, the sky, beyond the sky, is the limit on what I hope we can do with this suit. Ultimately.
Host: I love that the beyond the sky’s the limit from the Moon into Mars. From the Moon and to Mars. And Dan, over to you in closing, what does it mean for you to be part of human’s return to the Moon?
Dan Green: Yeah. You know, I am very honored to be involved in these projects and have a role in getting us back to the Moon to stay this time. You know, it’s a generation-defining achievement. And to be a part of it is very exciting. You know, and I hope that Artemis and Artemis II and Artemis III and so on, the whole program is a steppingstone so that we can kind of continue this momentum on and explore to Mars and the rest of our solar system. So being at this kind of beginning step, returning to the Moon and starting that journey is really awesome.
Host: And over you, Dustin, what does it mean for you to be part of humanity’s return to the Moon?
Dustin Gohmert: I mean, Dan really, really said it, it’s an honor and privilege that we’ve had to work on this. It’s a job that you can’t really explain in words in terms of how exciting it is. And, you know, we approach it, try to approach it, with some humility, but it’s impossible not to be proud of this accomplishment. As they say, we stand on the shoulders of giants. So many people have come before us and done so many great things. And so many crews have sacrificed for this as well. Our job is to build on their legacies, build on their sacrifices, enable the next generation to do these amazing things we’re setting out to. And it’s something that I will carry with me for the rest of my days, for sure.
Host: Well, Dustin, Dan, this was a fantastic conversation. I learned so much and I know our listeners likely did, too. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
Dustin Gohmert: Oh, thank you for having us, Kenna.
Dan Green: Thanks, Kenna.
[Music]
Host: Thanks for sticking around. We hope you learn something today. For more information on the Artemis program and the Orion Crew Survival System suit, check out nasa.gov/Artemis. And if you want more NASA podcasts, you can find all the great shows from across the agency at nasa.gov/podcasts. You could also find Johnson Space Center on social media on Facebook, X, and Instagram. To contact us, use #AskNASA on your favorite platform and make sure to mention it’s for Houston We Have a Podcast.
This episode was recorded on Oct. 25, 2024. Thanks to the Houston We Have a Podcast team, Courtney Beasley, Will Flato, Daniel Tohill, Dane Turner, Abby Graf, and Dominique Crespo. Thanks to Natalia Riusech for connecting us with our guests. And of course, thanks again to Dustin Gohmert and Dan Green for coming on to speak with us. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.
This is an Official NASA Podcast.