Games People Play

NASA has awarded Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace task orders under existing contracts to advance spacewalking capabilities in low Earth orbit and moonwalking services for Artemis missions.

The latest Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (read Spacesuit) task orders, each valued at $5-million, are intended to see Axiom Space begin work on a spacesuit for use in low Earth orbit, and Collins Aerospace to commence working on a spacesuit for use on the lunar surface—each company essentially saddled with making its suit functionally interchangeable with the other’s.

Lara Kearney, manager of the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, stated: “These task orders position NASA for success should additional capabilities become necessary or advantageous to NASA’s missions as the agency paves the way for deep space exploration and commercialization of low Earth orbit.”

Ms. Kearney added: “Using this competitive approach we will enhance redundancy, expand future capabilities, and further invest in the space economy.”

Both Axiom and Collins have proposed plans to continue developing their respective spacesuits to perform in environments differing from those outlined in their initial task order awards. Axiom Space was previously awarded an initial task order to develop a spacewalking system for demonstration in partial gravity on the lunar surface during Artemis III. The company will now begin early assessments for the extension of that suit for use outside the International Space Station.

Conversely, Collins Aerospace was previously awarded an initial task order to develop a spacewalking system for demonstration in microgravity outside the space station. Collins will now begin early assessments for the extension of that suit for use on the lunar surface.

Both companies’ assessments will provide NASA insight and redundancy vis-à-vis use of the two suits—notwithstanding the considerable differences between low Earth orbit and the lunar surface—to include different gravitational fields, natural space exigencies such as radiation, and mission tasks the likes of floating in microgravity or walking in partial gravity.

NASA’s investments in the additional capabilities with which the agency has tasked Axiom and Collins will ostensibly help bolster a strong commercial space industry. Both companies will own the spacesuits it develops under the contract and may pursue other commercial customers and explore non-NASA commercial applications for the associated technologies.

That NASA’s addenda to Axiom’s and Collins’s Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services task orders are redolent of arbitrary chain-jerking and gratuitous legerdemain is patently self-evident. The space agency, however, frames its apparent duplicity in artful euphemism, setting forth “expanding the commercial space services market is an important element of NASA’s long-term goals of exploration in low Earth orbit and in deep space, including the Moon and Mars.”

FMI: www.nasa.gov/suitup