Inspector General: The state of NASA’s spacesuits on ISS is becoming critical
NASA’s failed Moon spacesuits
A new NASA inspector report issued today [pdf] has found that the single contractor NASA uses to maintain the spacesuits on ISS, Collins Aerospace, has increasingly been unable to do the job, and NASA has no alternative contractor to turn to. From the report’s executive summary:
We previously reported on NASA’s spacesuit management in 2017 and 2021, finding that the Agency faced a wide array of risks to sustaining the EMUs [the spacesuits], including design inadequacies, health risks, and low inventories of spacesuit life support systems, ultimately leading to NASA’s efforts to design and develop next-generation suits to replace the existing EMUs. Specifically, the EMU design flaws have increased the chance of and led to unexpected water in helmets, thermal regulation malfunctions, and astronaut injuries. Given that spacesuits are necessary to meet future ISS maintenance needs until its planned decommissioning in 2030, it is critical that NASA effectively manages the contract performance and subsequent safety risks associated with ESOC [the contract with Collins].
…Until the ISS’s planned decommission at the end of the decade, NASA will continue to require spacewalking capabilities to perform upgrades and corrective and preventative maintenance to the Station. However, Collins’ performance on ESOC increases programmatic risks to NASA as it attempts to conduct safe spacewalks outside the ISS and maintain critical EMU life support component inventories. The contractor is experiencing considerable schedule delays, cost overruns, and quality issues that significantly increase the risk to maintaining NASA’s spacewalking capability.
Collins was awarded this five-year cost-plus maintenance contract in 2010 for $324 million. Since then NASA has been repeatedly extending it, so that it now runs through 2027 and has funneled $1.4 billion into Collins’ bank account. Yet Collins has repeatedly failed to deliver necessary repair parts, even as there have been more frequent problems on ISS, including several cases where spacewalks had to be aborted because an astronaut’s life was in danger. Here are just a few examples cited in the report:
NASA very old and complex ISS spacesuit
Collins is years behind its delivery schedule for several components that NASA considers critical to completing spacewalks. For example, a fan pump separator, due in 2022, has been delayed to late 2025. A fan pump separator is essential to ensuring a consistent flow of breathable air, regulating the astronaut’s body temperature, and preventing water from interfering with breathing. The most notable failure of a fan pump separator occurred in July 2013 when an astronaut experienced dangerous levels of water in his helmet resulting in an almost catastrophic spacewalking incident. Additionally, a refurbished shear plate assembly, due in 2022, has been delayed to late 2025 as well. The shear plate assembly provides the crucial connection points for the oxygen tanks that supply breathable air.
What makes this situation even more disgraceful and worrisome is that these suits were first designed a half century ago, and that NASA spent more than than a billion dollars and fourteen years trying to come up with its own replacement while never even producing a prototype. It canceled this failed effort in 2021 and in 2022 awarded Axiom and Collins separate contracts to build replacement suits. Axiom’s suit appears to be developing as planned, with underwater tests successfully completed in August 2025, but that suit is not intended for ISS but for NASA’s Artemis Moon program.
Not surprisingly, in 2024 Collins backed out of its contract.
While Axiom’s suit could likely be adapted to ISS use if necessary, the situation on ISS right now is not good. The report also notes that Collins’s overall performance has been declining, citing numerous examples of quality control failures, schedule delays, and cost overruns. The quality control failures were especially concerning, as several included delivering suit parts that were either built incorrectly or did not meet their design specifications and were unsafe.
With no replacement suits available, it is possible that NASA will soon find itself unable to do any spacewalks on its half of the station. And since such walks are frequently necessary to do repairs and maintenance, this possibility means that the station’s operation could become threatened.
Increasingly it appears that getting ISS to survive until its planned retirement in 2030 is becoming more and more difficult.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
NASA’s failed Moon spacesuits
A new NASA inspector report issued today [pdf] has found that the single contractor NASA uses to maintain the spacesuits on ISS, Collins Aerospace, has increasingly been unable to do the job, and NASA has no alternative contractor to turn to. From the report’s executive summary:
We previously reported on NASA’s spacesuit management in 2017 and 2021, finding that the Agency faced a wide array of risks to sustaining the EMUs [the spacesuits], including design inadequacies, health risks, and low inventories of spacesuit life support systems, ultimately leading to NASA’s efforts to design and develop next-generation suits to replace the existing EMUs. Specifically, the EMU design flaws have increased the chance of and led to unexpected water in helmets, thermal regulation malfunctions, and astronaut injuries. Given that spacesuits are necessary to meet future ISS maintenance needs until its planned decommissioning in 2030, it is critical that NASA effectively manages the contract performance and subsequent safety risks associated with ESOC [the contract with Collins].
…Until the ISS’s planned decommission at the end of the decade, NASA will continue to require spacewalking capabilities to perform upgrades and corrective and preventative maintenance to the Station. However, Collins’ performance on ESOC increases programmatic risks to NASA as it attempts to conduct safe spacewalks outside the ISS and maintain critical EMU life support component inventories. The contractor is experiencing considerable schedule delays, cost overruns, and quality issues that significantly increase the risk to maintaining NASA’s spacewalking capability.
Collins was awarded this five-year cost-plus maintenance contract in 2010 for $324 million. Since then NASA has been repeatedly extending it, so that it now runs through 2027 and has funneled $1.4 billion into Collins’ bank account. Yet Collins has repeatedly failed to deliver necessary repair parts, even as there have been more frequent problems on ISS, including several cases where spacewalks had to be aborted because an astronaut’s life was in danger. Here are just a few examples cited in the report:
NASA very old and complex ISS spacesuit
Collins is years behind its delivery schedule for several components that NASA considers critical to completing spacewalks. For example, a fan pump separator, due in 2022, has been delayed to late 2025. A fan pump separator is essential to ensuring a consistent flow of breathable air, regulating the astronaut’s body temperature, and preventing water from interfering with breathing. The most notable failure of a fan pump separator occurred in July 2013 when an astronaut experienced dangerous levels of water in his helmet resulting in an almost catastrophic spacewalking incident. Additionally, a refurbished shear plate assembly, due in 2022, has been delayed to late 2025 as well. The shear plate assembly provides the crucial connection points for the oxygen tanks that supply breathable air.
What makes this situation even more disgraceful and worrisome is that these suits were first designed a half century ago, and that NASA spent more than than a billion dollars and fourteen years trying to come up with its own replacement while never even producing a prototype. It canceled this failed effort in 2021 and in 2022 awarded Axiom and Collins separate contracts to build replacement suits. Axiom’s suit appears to be developing as planned, with underwater tests successfully completed in August 2025, but that suit is not intended for ISS but for NASA’s Artemis Moon program.
Not surprisingly, in 2024 Collins backed out of its contract.
While Axiom’s suit could likely be adapted to ISS use if necessary, the situation on ISS right now is not good. The report also notes that Collins’s overall performance has been declining, citing numerous examples of quality control failures, schedule delays, and cost overruns. The quality control failures were especially concerning, as several included delivering suit parts that were either built incorrectly or did not meet their design specifications and were unsafe.
With no replacement suits available, it is possible that NASA will soon find itself unable to do any spacewalks on its half of the station. And since such walks are frequently necessary to do repairs and maintenance, this possibility means that the station’s operation could become threatened.
Increasingly it appears that getting ISS to survive until its planned retirement in 2030 is becoming more and more difficult.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
So Collins cannot even replicate parts that have Benn in existence for decades. Why do they still have a contract? Why has no one been fired over this? I know several manufacturers who, given the original plans, could have spec parts assembled and ready to go in less than a year. Especially for the kind of money Collins’s (and NASA) just flushed away.
Of course cost overruns are a feature, not a bug.
Well, that’s alarming. To put it mildly.
“With no replacement suits available, it is possible that NASA will soon find itself unable to do any spacewalks on its half of the station.”
Difficult to escape this conclusion, alas.
Another failed government acquisition. Well not failed to the palace the money went. Now give them more money.
This is ridiculous. Give the specs and drawings to some other company with an in-house space-grade manufacturing capability and let them turn out the needed parts. Blue Origin, SpaceX, Impulse, Vast and Rocket Lab are an off-the-top-of-my-head list but hardly an exhaustive one. OldSpace needs to be informed in no uncertain terms that incumbency is now worth nothing and it must march or die.
NASA needs to be taken behind the barn and put out of its misery.
From a comment at Rand Simberg’s Transterrestrial Musings:
“When the Goddard NASA Academy did a field trip to JSC, we got to visit the hanger where they were working on the X-34, IIRC. I posed the question “Wasn’t this program canceled?” To which the reply was “we have to verify the components delivered are to spec”. Which was quite perplexing to someone from the business world, where when a project is canceled that’s it. Done.”
Words fail.
Axiom has been under contract to produce versions of its Artemis AxEMU suit for use at ISS ever since Collins withdrew.
”Words fail.”
The X-34 was cancelled for the convenience of the government. The contractor had a right to be paid for all work performed. Verifying that the work billed was actually performed before paying off an invoice is standard practice, both in the business and government contracting worlds.
@Joe, best guess, the original plans for the space suits are open source. Suggest you mention to your contacts the possibility of becoming a supplier of space suits or even putting it together yourself.
Just like NASA isn’t it? They and their partners totally [deleted] building rocket motors so they just bought Russian rocket motors for 20 years and used them in lieu of actually building any themselves and what is the obvious solution to the latest NASA failure? Why not hire the Russians to repair the station as required? I’m sure President Putin wouldn’t be greedy and demand tradesies for such a friendly act while Trump is passing targeting data to Ukraine to hit targets thousands of miles deep in Russia.
Why does anybody take NASA seriously anymore?
Curtis: You appear to be a new commenter, so I will only issue you a warning. My commenting rules are very clear: No obscenities! Changing one letter, as you did, doesn’t work to get around these rules.
I have deleted the curse words from your comment. Please follow the rules in the future.
Why you feel a need to curse is beyond me? Why do you feel a need to debase yourself in this manner?