The NASA Office of Inspector General, the aerospace agency’s auditor, has admitted that work on next-generation spacesuits has stalled due to a lack of technology, and won’t finish in time to use them for the planned Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2028.
In a report [PDF] published on Monday, the Inspector General points out that NASA kicked off its quest for “next-gen spacesuits” to visit the moon with 2022’s Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) program, which called for private suppliers to develop two suits: one to handle microgravity at the International Space Station (ISS) and another to wear on the moon.
The question must be asked: why is the technology for reliable Moon-ready spacesuits proving so elusive today, when NASA allegedly put astronauts on the lunar surface back in 1969 with far less advanced computing power and materials?
The Register report: NASA allocated $3.1 billion to the contracts and selected Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to work on the project. The latter dropped out in 2024 after deciding it couldn’t hit the required deadlines.
The report says NASA’s delivery dates “were overly optimistic and ultimately proved unachievable” and warns that past experience of spacesuit development suggests Axiom Space won’t have even demo suits ready before 2031.
That’s bad because NASA’s plans call for a moon landing in 2028, while the ISS will end its mission in 2030.
The Office of Inspector General blames the xEVAS contracts for the mess.
“NASA’s choice to use a firm-fixed-price, service-based acquisition strategy for xEVAS aligns with the Agency’s strategic decision to shift the risk of cost overruns to the contractor, as well as help foster a commercial space economy,” the report notes.
“However, in this case, the firm-fixed-price contract approach conflicted with the developmental nature of next-generation spacesuits, which carry higher levels of technical, financial, and schedule risk.”
The report also notes that until NASA issued xEVAS contracts, no commercial market for spacesuits existed. The document also criticizes “overly burdensome requirements like requiring offerors to bid on both microgravity and lunar spacesuits” as that limited the pool of companies capable of doing the job.
“In our judgment, while firm-fixed-price and service-based contracts can be viable options for certain NASA procurements, applying that approach to a developmental effort like xEVAS introduced its own set of risks to achieving NASA’s goals,” the report finds.
Among those risks were NASA identifying “systemic management issues” related to Collins Aerospace’s work on the suits it currently provides for the ISS, and Axiom Space having zero experience building spacesuits.
Another NASA blunder saw the agency decide not to set a standard for all spacesuit manufacturers to meet. The report finds that regrettable because spacesuits “must interface with almost every Artemis spacecraft and asset, including the commercial Human Landing System vehicles, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, pressurized crewed rovers, and habitation modules.”
Without a standard, the Office of Inspector General worries that “differences in systems – from airlocks, hatch sizes, and suit interfaces, both government and commercial – may limit full interoperability.”
Such limitations have already emerged: The report notes that Blue Origin is one of the companies bidding to build the lunar lander for future Artemis missions and used a NASA reference document to design the “don/doff area” in which astronauts put on and remove spacesuits. Axiom Space, however, decided to use a different connector than the one in NASA’s reference document.
“For the Axiom spacesuit to be compatible with the Blue Moon lander, Blue Origin must either make significant changes to the crew module airlock layout or develop its own don/doff hardware to support Axiom’s design, potentially increasing the cost to NASA,” the report found. “A uniform spacesuit standard could have mitigated this issue.”
NASA might have a way out of this because it can appoint new suppliers under xEVAS, and three companies – SpaceX, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and ILC Dover – are already working on suitable spacesuits.
But if Axiom Space doesn’t succeed, the report warns NASA may need to revert to its current spacesuits which are much less capable than those planned for use in future, and therefore “significantly adjust its lunar plans.”
Those plans currently call for 2027’s Artemis III to test docking in space, and for 2028’s Artemis IV mission to land astronauts on the Moon.
Work on the vehicle that will make that landing is under way, with SpaceX and Blue Origin competing to win the gig. There’s no guarantee either company will be ready for 2028. And as another recent Office of Inspector General report found, both designs have potential flaws.