Speaker 1: All right. Good morning. Uh, my name is Russell Rson. I'm the Deputy Program Manager of UVA at Action Space. In the suit here this morning is Jim Stein. Uh, Jim is an extraordinary engineer. He's a chief engineer on, uh, our team. So we gave him the honors. Yeah, go
Speaker 2: Ahead.
Speaker 1: We, we gave Jim the honors of demonstrating [00:00:30] the soup this morning. I'm gonna give him this, uh, this little walking staff here. Um, we are an earth gravity. We're not on moon. If anybody doesn't know, um, on the moon, the gravity's got one six of what it is here. So just in case Jim loses his balance, safety reasons, want him to have that. But, so I'm gonna talk through the suit design, uh, just very briefly, and as I do that, uh, Jim's gonna perform some different, um, actions, mobility to demonstrate the mobility of the suit. Uh, before we, before we get into that though, I wanna talk about this cover layer. So the cover layer that you see, the, the black, the orange, the blue. [00:01:00] Um, personally I think this looks amazing. Uh, I wanna thank Esther Marquis for helping us design this. Esther is, um, a designer, a space suit designer on the show for all mankind, if anyone has seen that on Apple TV Plus.
Speaker 1: Um, so, so this suit has a lot of that. It works into this. Um, one of the differences between this suit and the suit that will be on the moon is that it will, the moon suit will mostly be white, so we'll replace all the black with white, and that's really for thermal reasons. So didn't want anybody to, to get that mixed up. Um, but other than that, I think this is just a fantastic, [00:01:30] fantastic looking suit. So let me, let me go top to bottom here. Um, and just describe the suit overall. So we'll start with the light band. I think you guys saw the lights as Jim walked out on stage, uh, on the lightbound is mounted to the visor assembly and to the helmet bubble. Uh, and this, this essentially gives the astronauts lights to see whether they're in shaded portions of the moon, or if they're in low earth orbit in a night pass, they can turn on these lights to see, um, using tools or translating on the space station or anything like that.
Speaker 1: We also have, on the side here, we have a HD [00:02:00] video camera. So those of us back on Spaceship Earth watching the Eva, uh, will be able to watch it in high definition, which will be a fantastic upgrade, I think from, from current day technology. All of this is mounted on the helmet bubble, um, which is mounted to what we call and this configuration of our suit, the hard upper torso. So the hard upper torso goes roughly from Jim's waist up to the top. And, uh, this is kind of the core structure of the suit. It's what we attach everything to. Um, so the arms, we'll talk about the backpack in a minute. So yeah, if Jim wants to demonstrate some of the arm mobility [00:02:30] here, um, this really just provides us, again, some structured to mount things too. Each of the arms have a variety of, uh, mobility joints and elements that we've designed, uh, at Axiom, uh, including the gloves.
Speaker 1: The gloves are a critical, um, part of the suit design, especially for microgravity, EVAs, where you're using them for hours at a time to translate, to operate tools, to, you know, fix things to the suit and so on. So we've put a ton of effort into those gloves, pretty, pretty proud of where they're at and, and are confident those are gonna perform, uh, very well. [00:03:00] If Jim turns to the side here, um, some people may be wondering, Hey, how do you even get in this suit? Uh, there's a hatch on the back. Actually, you can see two hinges here. So this suit's a little bit different than the suits of, uh, kind of today that's used on the space station. So this is called a rear entry design or a back entry design. This hatch would open up, um, you would put your feet in, put your arms in, and, and kind of shimmy down into the suit.
Speaker 1: And then we would close the hatch, um, mounted to the hatch. Is this box affectionately known as the backpack? Uh, we call it [00:03:30] the, the portable life support system. So inside of this box are all the parts and the components to keep, to kind of keep you alive while you're doing e eva. You can think of it as like a very fancy scuba tank and air conditioner kind of combined into one. Um, so on the lower torso. So let's start kind of from the waist going down to the, to the boots. Um, I'll let Jim do some squats and lunges and, and, and just show off some of the, uh, some of the mobility, uh, that the suit has and demonstration some different movements. There's a variety of joints that we've put as well into [00:04:00] the lower torso assembly, and this is gonna be a huge improvement over the Apollo suits.
Speaker 1: The Apollo suits didn't have many of these types of joints that we've put in this suit. So the astronauts will be more comfortable, have an easier time walking, performing tasks, um, getting down to like, to pick up our rock or something like that, or use a geology tool. Um, and then the other thing that, uh, yeah, that's a great, great demonstration there about my Jim. Um, the other thing I wanted to touch on is the boots. The boots are critical, uh, critical part of the suit, especially for the, [00:04:30] the Artemis three mission and missions to the, the, the south pole of the moon. Um, we'll be entering regions called permanently shadowed regions. These are regions of the moon that never see sunlight, and they're very, very cold. And so it's very important that we insulate the boots, uh, appropriately to keep the astronauts feet, um, uh, comfortable. During the eva, that's a portion of the design. There's, there's, um, as, as Mr. Serini mentioned, there's many portions of this design that we've, that we've kind of adopted from xcm U and are continuing to refine. That's, that's an excellent portion. The, the Xcm U team did a tremendous job [00:05:00] and a lot of our teammates did a tremendous job designing those boots. So we're taking those forward and refining them to flight. Um, those are a really, a key aspect of the suit.
