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This Smart, Super-Stretchy Spacesuit Is Like a Second Skin

It's like shrink wrap.
Image: Shutterstock

Spacesuits have comelong way since the 1960s. But they're still bulky spacewear, if you will, limiting the astronaut's range of movement. But, MIT researchers are working on a "second skin" spacesuit that is flexible, lightweight, and lined with "tiny, muscle-like coils."

"With conventional spacesuits, you're essentially in a balloon of gas that's providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure,] to keep you alive in the vacuum of space," said Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT. "We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure — applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials."

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Newman has been working on a flexible, form-fitting spacesuit for the last decade. In that time, she and colleagues have engineered "active compression garments" that use "small, springlike coils that contract in response to heat." The coils are built out of shape-memory alloy (SMA), which essentially creates a smart spacesuit that (after heating) "remembers" its engineered shape after being bent or deformed by an astronaut's body.

Bradley Holschuh, a post-doctorate in Newman's lab, originally came up with the idea of a coil design. In the past, the big hurdle to second-skin spacesuits was this: How do astronauts squeeze in and out of the pressured, skintight suit? Holschuh's breakthrough was to deploy shape-memory alloy as a technological end-around.

To train the alloy, Holschuh wound raw SMA fiber into "extremely tight, millimeter-diameter coils," then heated the coils to 450 degrees Celsius to fashion an original or "trained" shape. As noted by MIT, much like a paper clip, the coils can be stretched or bent at room temperature. At a trigger temperature, which in this case was as low as 60 degrees Celsius, the fiber can spring back to its trained state.

"The researchers rigged an array of coils to an elastic cuff, attaching each coil to a small thread linked to the cuff," according to MIT. "They then attached leads to the coils' opposite ends and applied a voltage, generating heat. Between 60 and 160 C, the coils contracted, pulling the attached threads, and tightening the cuff."

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Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT

In one possible spacesuit design implementation, the coils would radiate to the astronauts extremities from the suit's center. When activated with a current, the suit would tighten. Another option would find coils placed strategically across the spacesuit, achieving similar results. Holschuh likened it to shrink-wrapping.

"These are basically self-closing buckles," Holschuh says. "Once you put the suit on, you can run a current through all these little features, and the suit will shrink-wrap you, and pull closed."

The big challenge now is to keep the spacesuit tight. This could require a constant hot temperature, which would require energy and would be uncomfortable, or researchers could develop a locking mechanism. Once Newman and her team find a solution to this problem, their suit could find other applications here on Earth.

"You could [also] use this as a tourniquet system if someone is bleeding out on the battlefield," Holschuh said. "If your suit happens to have sensors, it could tourniquet you in the event of injury without you even having to think about it."

"An integrated suit is exciting to think about to enhance human performance," Newman added. "We're trying to keep our astronauts alive, safe, and mobile, but these designs are not just for use in space."

But, why limit it to the battlefield? The suit could have applications in medicine, and ambulances would certainly have need for it. Professional sports organizations might even dabble in it for their players, which could pave the way—if the technology is sufficiently cheap—for other uses. And who wouldn't want to walk around in their own shrink-wrapping suit?