After the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission earlier this month, focus turned to what comes next in NASA’s roadmap to return humans to the Moon.
The biggest question concerned the readiness of lunar landers, the complex and essential machines needed to take astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up to orbit. And as Ars reported at the time, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have a significant amount of developmental and testing work left to do before even a prototype lander is ready.
But a secondary question has been the development of spacesuits, which are necessary for astronauts to exit their landers and explore the lunar surface. Less is publicly known about their development.
However, the release of a report by NASA’s Inspector General on Monday sheds some light on this progress. And for those interested in NASA’s aggressive 2028 timeline to land humans on the Moon, it’s worth noting what the report did and did not say.
The report
Broadly speaking, the new report examines the process by which NASA has gone about acquiring lunar spacesuits. For those not paying attention to spacesuit procurement—which is basically everyone with a life or without a financial interest in the matter—it has been a long and tortured process. NASA has been working internally for decades to develop a next-generation spacesuit.
It has been a messy, bloated process, so the space agency decided to try something different in 2022. Following a more commercial procurement process, NASA awarded two Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) contracts—firm-fixed-price, service-based contracts worth up to $3.1 billion—to teams led by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace. Axiom was a new space company with no experience in spacesuits, and Collins was a more traditional provider with a lot of experience.
However, two years later, Collins dropped out of the competition. The company had apparently not managed the contract particularly well and determined it could not continue working on spacesuits profitably.
“Collins’ descope from xEVAS negated the competition and redundancy sought by the Agency, leaving NASA with only one xEVAS spacesuit provider,” the inspector general’s report finds. “If Axiom cannot satisfy its contractual requirements in a timely or cost-effective manner, then NASA could be forced to continue using the problematic EMUs throughout the life of the ISS and significantly adjust its lunar plans.”