Next Moon Mission May Have a Spacesuit Problem

NASA's next moonwalk may be tripped up by the wardrobe department. A new report from the agency's Office of Inspector General warns that the spacesuits needed for a planned 2028 lunar landing are running behind schedule and might not be ready before 2031. NASA's existing suits for spacewalks outside the International Space Station date back to designs from more than 50 years ago, and its Apollo-era moon gear is no longer usable, Scientific American reports.

• To fix that, NASA in 2022 tapped Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to build next-generation suits for both the moon and microgravity environments under contracts worth up to $3.1 billion—then planned to essentially rent the suits for missions.

• That strategy is now under fire. Collins exited the program in 2024 after missing milestones, leaving Axiom as the sole provider and pushing an already "overly optimistic and ultimately unachievable" schedule even further out, the watchdog says.
• The report questions NASA's decision to outsource the project instead of developing the suits in-house, especially since little non-NASA demand is expected. Other players like SpaceX, however, have been developing their own designs. A SpaceX suit variant was tested during the private Polaris Dawn mission in 2024, and the company says it could adapt the design for lunar use.

• The timing crunch is tight: NASA wants to test new microgravity suits on the ISS before the station is retired, possibly as early as 2030, and it needs lunar suits for Artemis IV, the mission slated to return astronauts to the moon's surface in 2028.
• Sources tell Ars Technica that the 2031 date in the report is too pessimistic and that both NASA and Axiom are pushing hard to meet deadlines.
• In a post on X, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said he appreciated the Office of Inspector General's work. He said NASA is reviewing where it can do better and "provide relief where appropriate to burdensome requirements." "I am confident that when NASA is ready to land on the Moon in 2028, our astronauts will be wearing Axiom suits," he wrote.
• "The NASA OIG's concerns about meeting schedules are not surprising," Cathleen Lewis, curator of International Space Programs and Spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, tells Scientific American. "Historically, the space suit has been the last piece of the human spaceflight puzzle."

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