New moon suit for NASA’s Artemis astronauts unveiled

In space, moon suits are the height of fashion, and NASA officials on Wednesday lavished praise on what astronauts will be wearing when they step on the moon in the coming years. “We’re developing a spacesuit for a new generation,” Robert D. Cabana, NASA’s associate administrator, said during an event in Houston unveiling the new suit. The latest in lunar space wear — black with orange and blue highlights — comes from Axiom Space in Houston. By turning to this private company, NASA is again relying on new commercial space enterprises to provide key components faster and cheaper than it could itself develop.

The approach follows the template NASA used in hiring Elon Musk’s company SpaceX to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and to the lunar surface on the mission for which the Axiom suits were designed.

The moon suit is a key component that is required for the Artemis program, which will be sending astronauts back to the moon as NASA faces heightened competition in space and on the moon from China’s booming space sector. The Axiom suits will be worn during the Artemis III mission, the program’s first moon landing, which is scheduled for 2025.

During Wednesday’s reveal on a stage at Space Center Houston, James Stein, the suit’s chief engineer, demonstrated the lunar gear, showing how he could easily squat and move around. The large clear bubble around the head provides wide visibility as well as lighting, which will be important when astronauts step into shadowed craters near the lunar south pole, where NASA hopes to study water ice at the bottom of cold, shadowed craters. It also has a mount for a high-definition camera.

Astronauts will get into and out of the spacesuit via a hatch in the backside. “You would put your feet in, put your arms in and then kind of shimmy down into the suit,” said Russell Ralston, deputy program manager for extravehicular activity at Axiom Space. “And then we would close the hatch.”

On the back is a backpack-like contraption containing the life support system. “You can think of it as a very fancy scuba tank and air-conditioner, kind of combined into one,” Mr. Ralston said.

But the prototype shown Wednesday was not exactly what will be going to the moon. For one, the actual suits will be white instead of dark, reflecting heat from sunlight instead of absorbing it. In addition, the current outer covering keeps the inner portions from being scuffed or damaged during ground testing. For the moon, the suit will have an outer insulation layer to protect the astronaut from extreme temperatures, radiation and dust.

Axiom is led by Michael Suffredini, who previously served as NASA’s program manager for the International Space Station. The company has been primarily focused on low-Earth orbit, sending private astronauts to the I.S.S. and building a private module to be added to the space station. A variation of the moon suit could be used on a future Axiom private space station for spacewalks.

Outsourcing the development of spacesuits is a major course correction for NASA, which spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing its own suit called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU. The xEMU suits were to serve both for the upcoming moon missions and as replacements f