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.