![]() ![]() Several have been lost over the years, including in the Challenger and Columbia disasters and in a SpaceX cargo mission that exploded in 2015. Today astronauts still use the same 40-year-old space suits NASA hasn’t made any new ones since they were designed. (The agency faced a similar situation in the 1960s, with the opposite problem: The first space capsules, tiny and cramped, required astronauts to be no taller than 5 feet 11 inches.) “Applicants had to be bigger to be selected,” Dunbar says. NASA was forced to judge prospective astronauts not only by their qualifications and experience, but by their size, too. The restrictions piled up after the space-shuttle program ended in 2011 and the ISS became the only destination for astronauts. While it didn’t impact space-shuttle crew assignments, since crew members who didn’t spacewalk, such as Currie, could do research or run the robotic arm, “it did impact assignments on the ISS where all crew members-Russian and U.S.-had to be able to conduct ,” says Bonnie Dunbar, a former NASA astronaut who flew on the shuttle five times and an aerospace-engineering professor at Texas A&M University, where she runs a space-suit-design lab. The limited sizing affected some astronaut duties. Literally, I mean, some fourth graders are bigger than me,” Nancy Currie, a NASA astronaut who is 5 feet tall, told NPR in a 2006 interview. Most astronauts fit into the mediums and larges, but not all. Extra small was the first to go, and small followed soon after. In the 1990s, several years after the first American women flew to space, budget cuts forced NASA to trim its space-suit program. And Whitson would know: She also holds the record for the most space walks for a female astronaut, 10. “As a woman, doing space walks is more challenging mostly because the suits are sized bigger than the average female,” Peggy Whitson, a NASA astronaut who helped build the ISS and who holds the American record for time spent in space, said in a recent documentary interview. ![]() “If, for example, a one-piece coverall designed for a man is meant to fit at the shoulders and the hips, then one of these fit areas is likely to be compromised for a woman.”Įxtra room can actually make space walks more difficult. “For the same height and weight, women can have significantly wider hips and narrower shoulders than men,” Benson wrote. This approach doesn’t account for differences in the body shape of men and women. “Some groups initially assumed that women could fit in the same sizes as small men-or at worst, that some of the men’s sizes would have to be scaled down proportionately to fit women,” Elizabeth Benson, a NASA design engineer, wrote in a 2009 paper on sizing considerations in space-suit design. Space-suit engineers thought that outfitting the new space travelers would be simple. The spacewalking suits-known as extravehicular mobility units, or EMUs-came in five sizes: extra small, small, medium, large, and extra large. Potato Head approach and developed pieces for arms, legs, and torsos that astronauts, from the smallest women to the largest men, could mix and match. Tailoring custom space suits for so many passengers would be too expensive and time-consuming. The shuttles were designed for a future of frequent flights to and from the space above Earth, with more astronauts than ever before. The space suits were custom-made for individual astronauts, all of whom were men.Īfter astronauts planted the American flag on the moon, NASA turned its focus toward the next phase in space travel, the space-shuttle program. Seamstresses went from sewing undergarments to stitching together thin layers of high-tech fabric on their noisy Singer sewing machines. The Apollo space suits were manufactured by the International Latex Corporation, the maker of Playtex bras and girdles. Not the Big Bang-we’ll save that for another day-but the 1960s, when NASA first started launching astronauts to space.īack then, women weren’t wearing space suits they were making them. To answer these questions, it helps to start at the beginning. Shouldn’t NASA have figured out which size space suit its astronauts needed before they launched, and had the appropriate gear waiting for them on the ISS? And how is it that the world’s premier space agency can dress two men for space walks without issue, as it did several times last year, but not two women? According to the space agency, the ISS doesn’t have enough space suits on board that would fit both women.Īt first glance, this seems like a massive oversight. But on Monday, just days before Anne McClain and Christina Koch were supposed to float outside, NASA announced that McClain had been replaced with a male astronaut, Nick Hague. I just found out that I’ll be on console providing support for the FIRST ALL FEMALE SPACEWALK with and and I can not contain my excitement!!!! #WomenInSTEM #WomenInEngineering #WomenInSpace - Kristen Facciol March 1, 2019 ![]()
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