What's appropriate apparel for Mars?

Ten students have built from naught a suit that would “allow wearers on earth to experience what it would feel like to wear a spacesuit on Mars”.

The development of the suit is pertinent because US space agency NASA hopes to send a human mission to the 'red planet' in about two decades. And experiments and field work for future missions to Mars are underway at the Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS as it is called, which is a habitat on an isolated, Mars-like site on Hawaii's Big Island.

The suit is the result of a year-long effort by students, all between 19- to 23-years-old, at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, US, in partnership with NASA and HI-SEAS. The carbon fibre-and-nylon suit is currently being refined and improved based on feedback by NASA scientists and by HI-SEAS crew members Andrzej Stewart and Dr Sheyna Gifford, who tested it in December. “The suit will go to Hawaii in the fall of 2017. Between now and then, we will be conducting tests here and at short duration simulation missions, such as at the Mars Desert Research Station,” says Michael Lye, senior critic at RISD's industrial design department and the college's NASA co-ordinator, under whose guidance the students worked.

Ideas and iterations

Lye acknowledges that it's difficult to design for an environment of which one lacks first-hand experience. “Most designs for space are designed by people who don’t, and realistically can't, experience that (zero-gravity),” he says. In addition to designing a suit for a simulated Mars environment, the students — seven of whom are from RISD's industrial design department and three from apparel design — were also tasked with fabricating a modular suit to fit people of any height in the 5.2ft -6.3ft range. They suit had to be easy to repair and modify, to maximise the fidelity of the sensation of wearing a suit and fit the budget of $15,000 (about Rs10 lakh), making it affordable for research.

The students started by collecting a range of inspiration material, including space references from science fiction as well as scientific facts, and also armour and items from the natural world. At one point, says Lye, they even considered a suit made entirely from hard elements with no fabric sleeves or legs, akin to a suit of armour. “One of the real challenges of designing a suit is getting the fit right for the range of people that might wear it. The solution we developed is called a Q-module, which allows a relatively quick change of the spacing and angles of the shoulder bearings,” says Lye, explaining that this was a crucial aspect of the suit, for if this were to go wrong, it would make the person wearing it uncomfortable while working, and possibly even be dangerous. Of all the designs the team considered, the Q-module one proved to be the one that was most easy to adjust, modify and repair.

Getting their hands dirty

As the final design evolved, the team set about putting the suit together, sourcing raw materials such as nylon, carbon fibre, plastics and polycarbonates, purchasing off-the-shelf components such as fasteners and bearings, tubing, zippers, batteries and a blower, and spending the summer of 2016 fabricating what would eventually become the suit's torso and visor.

Of the parts the team bought, the most complicated, reveals Lye, is a liquid cooling vest — something that motorcyclists wear on hot days while still wearing protective clothing. The vest has been used in the suit to keep the wearer from suffering a heat stroke. Incidentally, the vest itself is based on NASA's design for liquid cooling garments for Apollo astronauts, says Lye.

“With a few exceptions, the suit was almost entirely fabricated at RISD,” adds Lye. “The bigger challenge was developing the expertise to work with those materials to make the parts we needed.” This is where RISD's expertise and interdisciplinary students' skills came to the rescue. The team also sought out the skills of what Lye describes as “some of the world best sailboat builders” in Rhode Island when they went to fabricate the suit's hard, upper torso portion. “We began by making some quick and very low-fidelity mockups of the torso made of cardboard. We then translated that into digital model of the torso and worked with one of the smaller local companies to take the computer model and turn it into a mould machined from foam,” says Lye. “This reduced the total amount of time it took to make one of the more complicated hard parts of the suit. Although this could have been done completely by hand, this process allowed us to work on other projects while the computer controlled machine cut the foam into the shape we needed for the mould.”

Ready-to-wear

The team completed most of the assembly work by November 2016. Their Mars simulation suit fits someone as tall as 6.3ft and even a person 5.2ft-tall. It takes about 15 minutes to get in and out of with the help of just one person, adds Lye, and weighs about 22kg (50lbs). “The suit feels a little bit lighter than what an actual space suit would feel like on Mars, where the gravitational force is weaker than Earth’s,” he says. “Real space suits are too heavy (135-150 kg) to be worn while walking around on earth and our suit simulates what a suit might feel like when worn on Mars. Despite being lighter, the wearer is still carrying 50-100lbs (22-45kg). We’re improving the way that mass is carried by the person wearing it but it still isn’t as comfortable as we’d like to make it.”

The suit features a ventilation system to clear the helmet of exhaled carbon dioxide and keep the wearer cool during simulated missions. “The design utilises external ventilation hoses that make the suit far more comfortable for crew members than the simulation suits they’ve worn in the past,” says Lye, who admits to never having anticipated that he'd be designing space suits.

Lye, who has earlier worked on glove designs for space, describes working with the space agency as “exciting, challenging and very satisfying”. “It’s great that RISD students can have an influence on such an amazing endeavour as space exploration,” he says. “I think that we’ve been able to bring something different to this area as a result of the varying perspectives of the students that worked on the project. Being able to work with these students makes even something as daunting as designing a space suit a worthwhile, rewarding experience.”