After many years of attempts to create new spacesuits to go beyond the International Space Station (ISS) and work on the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program, NASA has started looking for developers of space equipment among private companies, writes ArsTechnica.
The publication notes that the American Space Agency has been creating spacesuits for these programs for the last 14 years, spending 420 million dollars on it. After NASA failed to develop the required space equipment, the agency turned to the private sector for "innovation".
ArsTechnica writes that NASA expects to spend more than $ 1 billion on the design, testing and certification of spacesuits before two of them are fully ready for operation. The publication admits that by 2024, when the United States plans to land a woman on the moon for the first time, the equipment will not be ready.
In July, Sergey Pozdnyakov, the general designer of the ZVEZDA research and production enterprise, said that the Orlan-ISS spacesuits currently available on the ISS were coming to the end of their shelf life.
In May, RIA Novosti, referring to the ISS crew's negotiations with Earth, reported that Russian cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov repaired a spacesuit pierced with a paper clip on the International Space Station with the help of a rubber lining.
Ivan Potapov