Dava Newman’s tightly tailored BioSuit isn’t simply a fashionable alternative to classic spacesuits:
The BioSuit’s tight, stretchy material applies pressure to the skin mechanically rather than barometrically, without gas and with much less restriction of movement. It’s made of a mix of polymers, including nylon and spandex, so it would probably be cheap to manufacture — maybe a tenth of the US $20 million price tag of one of today’s suits, Newman estimates. Her partners on the project are the industrial design firms Trotti & Associates, of Cambridge, Mass., and Dainese, based in Molvena, Italy, which specializes in gear for motorcyclists.
So the modern, cheaper one costs $2 million? Wow.
Anyway, it’s not just cheaper and better looking; it has real advantages:
The BioSuit is basically a fail-safe design: If you tear its fabric, you lose pressure only around the tear. You could fix it temporarily by wrapping it up tightly like an Ace bandage. A rip in a gas-pressurized suit, by contrast, triggers an increase in gas flow to give the wearer time to retreat to a vehicle or habitat. But if no shelter is available or the leak isn’t fixed quickly, even a tiny tear could become a major emergency.
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She has no doubt that someday we’ll see people bounding rather than hopping on the Red Planet. ”The best movement on Mars is loping,” she says, noting that Mars’s gravity is 38 percent that of Earth’s. ”Long steps with lots of aerial” will let astronauts cover more ground with less effort.”On Mars, we’re all extreme athletes,” she adds.