An astronaut is urging NASA to form a new spacesuit program now if it hopes to get back to the moon in 2024

Dave Mosher

 

11h

A prototype of NASA's xEMU spacesuit program called the Z-2. The agency is designing new suits for astronauts to explore planetary surfaces.

 NASA

• NASA is racing to land astronauts on the moon in 2024, a crash program called Artemis. 
• However, an independent panel of experts who review NASA activities say the agency is lacking a suitable spacesuit program. 
• "An integral system required to put boots on the moon are the boots," panel member Sandra Magnus, a former astronaut, said during a meeting on Friday. 
• Magnus and the panel think NASA needs to break out its existing spacesuit research efforts into a full-fledged program with budgets, deadlines, and authority. 
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NASA, you have a spacesuit problem. 

That was the crux of a message delivered on Friday by Sandra "Sandy" Magnus, a seasoned former astronaut, during an official meeting of spaceflight safety experts in Houston, Texas, on Friday. 

Magnus brought up the issue on behalf of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), which held its latest quarterly meeting at Johnson Space Center. The group operates independently and is tasked with "evaluating NASA's safety performance and advising the Agency on ways to improve that performance." 

NASA is racing to send people back to the moon, ideally landing the first woman and next man on the lunar surface in 2024, with its new Artemis program. (The last time anyone visited the moon was December 1972.) Naturally, ASAP had a lot to say about NASA's ambitious new effort. 

Read more: Astronauts explain why nobody has visited the moon in more than 45 years — and the reasons are depressing

Magnus, who flew to the International Space Station (ISS) twice and has spent more than five months in orbit, zeroed in on spacesuits required for the Artemis program's missions. 

"An integral system required to put boots on the moon are the boots," Magnus said. 

She added that spacesuits are essentially "one-person spaceships" that deserve similar levels of funding and scrutiny. 

"They're complex and they have stringent safety requirements, and are a critical component of not only the lunar program, but actually any potential exploration path that human spaceflight may engage upon in the future," Magnus said. 

NASA is struggling to keep its current spacesuits operational

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II floats outside NASA's Space Shuttle Challenger.

NASA

Right now, NASA's only operational EVA spacesuits are aboard the ISS. They're each about 40 years old— and not getting any younger. 

The panel previously reported that NASA is struggling to upgrade the suits, let alone maintain them. 

"The problem does not lie simply in the fact that the suits are old; the fact that manufacturers of several critical suit components, including the very fabric of the suits, have now gone out of business," ASAP wrote in April. 

This in part led to the cancellation in March of what was supposed to be the first all-female spacewalk. 

NASA has been working on a new spacesuit system called the xEMU, which stands for "Exploration Extra-vehicular Mobility Unit." The xEMU program is designed to both replace the aging relics that astronauts wear outside the space station and also pave the way for crewed exploration of the moon and Mars.