Cape Canaveral (USA) (AFP)
Space engineer Pablo de Leon has designed two prototypes of lunar and martian combinations and knows the time that their development has taken. He warns that to bring astronauts back to the moon in 2024, NASA must hurry.
"Nasa does not have a combination yet because the decision to go there in 2024 was apparently taken suddenly," says the Argentine engineer, director of a NASA-funded laboratory dedicated to manned flights to the university. North Dakota.
"On the one hand, there is this order to go to the Moon in 2024, and on the other, we have not developed any space suits since 1977," he told AFP during a recent visit to Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
That's right: the combinations used by Americans aboard the International Space Station for spacewalks were designed in the 1970s, and patched since. Only a handful remains in working order.
For the moment, NASA is focusing on the development of the rocket, the capsule and the lunar to transport the astronauts to the lunar ground. The choice of the combination will come next.
But for the engineer, the budget currently allocated to NASA, in the order of $ 21 billion a year, is not enough to speed up the work. He estimates the goal of 2024 "rather optimistic".
- Dangerous dust -
In his laboratory, Pablo de Leon and his teams have developed the combination NDX-1 for Mars and NDX-2 for the Moon.
A combination is "a machine as complex as a spacecraft" because it must provide astronauts with the same environment: temperature, pressure, humidity, radiation protection, as well as communications and energy. "All this in a garment."
In addition, two kinds are needed: one to float in the space vacuum, for example to exit the vessel to repair the outside; the other to walk on another world.
In weightlessness, the combination is almost rigid above the waist: "the feet are useless," says Pablo de Leon.
On the other hand, on the Moon or on Mars, astronauts will have to walk; their combination will have to be light and flexible enough for them to move forward, backward, jump, bend and manipulate tools.
Another problem, very important, is the lunar dust.
The Apollo astronauts quickly realized that this dust is very abrasive. It penetrates the upper layers of the suits and cuts like glass. "In three days they would have torn apart," says the expert. The longest Apollo mission lasted 75 hours on the Moon, but astronauts were not all the time out of the module.
On Earth, erosion "has rounded over millions and millions of years stones, sand, dust," says Pablo de Leon. But on the Moon, no erosion: "the pebbles, to the smallest particles, are very sharp, they cut the tissues like a saw".
As for Mars, where the Americans evoke a possible mission in the 2030s, the soil contains perchlorate, which is toxic to humans.
"It will be necessary to isolate all that has been in contact with the outside as soon as the astronauts remove their combinations". Habitats on Mars will need to be designed for this type of decontamination.
For now, the center of Pablo de Leon, and others in the United States, await news of NASA, which has not yet awarded a contract. No deadline has been set.
© 2019 AFP