Shrink-wrapping spacesuits

[cronus]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 094833.htm

Shrink-wrapping spacesuits: Spacesuits of the future may resemble a streamlined second skin

For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with tiny, musclelike coils. She would then plug in to a spacecraft's power supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap the garment around her body.

The skintight, pressurized suit would not only support the astronaut, but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration. To take the suit off, she would only have to apply modest force, returning the suit to its looser form.

Now MIT researchers are one step closer to engineering such an active, "second-skin" spacesuit: Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, and her colleagues have engineered active compression garments that incorporate small, springlike coils that contract in response to heat. The coils are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA) -- a type of material that "remembers" an engineered shape and, when bent or deformed, can spring back to this shape when heated.

The team incorporated the coils in a tourniquet-like cuff, and applied a current to generate heat. At a certain trigger temperature, the coils contract to their "remembered" form, such as a fully coiled spring, tightening the cuff in the process. In subsequent tests, the group found that the pressure produced by the coils equaled that required to fully support an astronaut in space.

"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," says Newman, who has worked for the past decade to design a form-fitting, flexible spacesuit of the future. "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. … Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration."

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[Hermit]

That's not a new concept. Jean-Claude Forest came up with it in his science fiction around 1962.



Five years later Roger Vadim produced a documentary on the same subject. Jane Fonda was the astronaut.

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

Yeah, 'muscle wire' has been used by hobbyists for some time. Incorporating it into a fabric seems a logical step.
I'm surprised it or something similar hasn't been used along with elastic polymers to make artificial muscles for robots, etc.

[Chaz]

I'm surprised it or something similar hasn't been used along with elastic polymers to make artificial muscles for robots, etc.

That's 'cos it's prolly a shit idea.

[Chaz]

Ahem.

Anyway, what about bloke's space suits? Would your tackle just be squashed flat like vacuum packed chicken...? Or would it need it's own little glove-like part?
...And how tight is that shit supposed to get?

[mistermack]

This seems to me to be a pisstake.

You can pressurise your skin as much as you like, it won't affect the vital problem of pressurising your mouth and nose and lungs. So you will have to have pressurised air going into your lungs, even if this suit works.
Also your eyes and ears would need the same, and any cuts on your skin would probably cause trouble. Basically, any bit of body fluid not properly pressurised will boil.

In any case, you would need shielding from cosmic rays, which a traditional suit provides.

I would have thought that machines and virtual reality control would solve the problem of working in space better than magic suits. You can have the operator comfortable and safe in a pressurised cabin, operating the machinery.

If surgeons can use machines to operate on people more reliably than their hands, then that's the future in space, I would think.