Business of Space: A peak at NASA’s increasingly lucrative commercial deals
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City A.M.’s Millie Turner offers up a roundup of the most important news across the space industry, every Friday.
- Next generation spacesuits
- SpaceX vs Boeing
- This weekend’s launches
Next generation spacesuits
Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace have been tasked with building the next generation of spacesuits for NASA, as the US agency looks to get boots on the Moon.
The spacesuits will be needed by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) alongside moonwalkers as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
Texas-based Axiom, the space firm behind what is expected to be the world’s first commercial space station, will compete with Collins for lucrative spacesuit contracts worth up to $3.5bn (£2.7bn) through to 2034, the space agency announced on Wednesday.
NASA will evaluate the performance and select one or both suit designs for continued development and operational use.
The suits will need to supply state-of-the-art communications and life support systems, with greater reserves for emergencies.
They will also have to undergo rigorous testing, sometime in 2025, in thermal vacuum chambers, which can be done both on Earth and just outside of the ISS – as microgravity as a service begins to grow in popularity.
It is understood that there will be separate suit designs for spacewalks, when astronauts climb outside of the ISS to perform works such as maintenance, and on-planet missions.
Dan Burbank, a former astronaut and veteran spacewalker who now works with Collins Aerospace, said that in microgravity outside the space station, “you can be in the 350-pound suit and it’s not an impediment. In fact, maybe by some estimations, it could actually be more stable platform to be in.”
“But on a planetary environment, you’ve got trip hazards and a surface that is not amenable to ease of motion anyway,” he explained.
“So, we would want to have a lower torso assembly that would have enough mobility for the crew member to walk naturally like they would on planet Earth.”
SpaceX vs Boeing
With NASA throwing its arms around commercial space, SpaceX continues to reap the rewards of the agency’s new pivot towards the private sector.
NASA earlier this week confirmed its plan to buy five more Crew Dragon missions from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which would see it ferry more astronauts to and from the ISS.
The latest announcement suggests that SpaceX will be flying nearly double the number of crewed missions as rival aerospace giant Boeing.
Despite Boeing’s recent successes with its Starliner capsule, which is already said to have helped restore its reputation following the shadow of its MAX 737 aircraft, SpaceX is still topping the race.
Onlookers are awaiting a crewed flight test from Boeing’s Starliner late this year or early 2023, which could see tip the scales as competition in a tight launch market escalates.
Though SpaceX’s highly anticipated Starship is looking likely to dazzle space agencies across the globe in the landgrab for Mars.
Writing on Twitter earlier today, Musk said that Starship’s ability to make humans an interplanetary species was its “primary purpose”, spurred by a quickly deteriorating climate situation on Earth.
What’s on tomorrow?
Two manned launches are on the cards for Saturday, should the weather play along.
China’s third crewed flight to its new space station, Tiangong – which translates to Heavenly Palace, is forecast to launch tomorrow, after the space station was hurled into orbit in April last year.
The mission will see three astronauts, sent aboard a 200-feet tall Long March 2F rocket, live on Tiangong for around six months to finish the station’s final stages of construction.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is anticipated to undergo its 21st mission since its landmark launch in July last year, which will be its second launch of 2022.
However, the launch has already been delayed once, having been pushed back on May 20.
The six paying passengers on the tourism flight include astronaut and investor Evan Dick, former NASA test lead Katya Echazarreta, business jet pilot and Action Aviation chairman Hamish Harding, civil production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha, adventurer and Dream Variation Ventures co-founder Jaison Robinson and explorer and co-founder of private equity firm Insight Equity Victor Vescovo.
The space tourists will experience around three minutes of weightlessness before the capsule begins to renter Earth’s atmosphere and parachuting softly into the Texan desert.