Artemis planners have a suit of problems

Notice I didn't say a suite - a group of related problems. I said suit of problems in reference to the lunar EVA suits they'll be wearing. Somewhere in the list of problems they're working through is that some observers are going to say, "why were suits not a problem for Apollo over 50 years ago but we have problems with them now?" The answers there get into the differences between Apollo's focus on "doing everything we can to ensure we can put a couple of guys on the moon for a couple of days to do what they can do" and Artemis' realization that no matter what Apollo did or accomplished, they have to somehow do more to make it look better for people that aren't paying as much attention as, say, YOU are paying. 

We've been tracking the work on the Artemis suits since they were first getting mentioned and through the development. Monday, we get a report from Ars Technica on the suits Axiom built and they're testing now.  According to former astronaut Kate Rubins who left the agency last year but is involved with testing and evaluating the new suits, “I don’t think they’re great right now.”

Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to do more than the first Moonwalkers did more than 50 years ago.

The Moonwalking experience will amount to an “extreme physical event” for crews selected for the Artemis program’s first lunar landings, a former NASA astronaut told a panel of researchers, physicians, and engineers convened by the National Academies. 

Kate Rubins attended a conference at The National Academies of Science last Tuesday through Thursday and outlined the concerns NASA officials often talk about: radiation exposure, muscle and bone atrophy, reduced cardiovascular and immune function, and other adverse medical effects of spaceflight.

It's widely quoted that there has been a continuous presence of humans in space for decades thanks to the International Space Station - with the implication that being in space isn't a big deal anymore. The important exception is that the lunar environment is not that of the ISS. It's harsher. Probably the most important of those is that the Moon is outside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere for half of the lunar month. Lunar dust is pervasive, and will get into lander. Probably the only thing that could be helpful is the Moon's partial gravity, about one-sixth as strong as the pull we feel on Earth. 

Rubins is a veteran of two long-duration spaceflights on the International Space Station, logging 300 days in space and conducting four spacewalks totaling nearly 27 hours. She is also an accomplished microbiologist and became the first person to sequence DNA in space. 

“What I think we have on the Moon that we don’t really have on the space station that I want people to recognize is an extreme physical stress,” Rubins said. “On the space station, most of the time you’re floating around. You’re pretty happy. It’s very relaxed. You can do exercise. Every now and then, you do an EVA (Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk).”

“When we get to the lunar surface, people are going to be sleep shifting,” Rubins said. “They’re barely going to get any sleep. They’re going to be in these suits for eight or nine hours. They’re going to be doing EVAs every day. The EVAs that I did on my flights, it was like doing a marathon and then doing another marathon when you were done.” 

They'll be in these suits eight or nine hours? Per day? How much do those suits weigh?

Including a life-support backpack, the commercial suit weighs more than 300 pounds in Earth’s gravity, but Axiom considers the exact number proprietary. The Axiom suit is considerably heavier than the 185-pound spacesuit the Apollo astronauts wore on the Moon. NASA’s earlier prototype exploration spacesuit was estimated to weigh more than 400 pounds, according to a 2021 report by NASA’s inspector general.

“We’ve definitely seen trauma from the suits, from the actual EVA suit accommodation,” said Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and medical doctor. “That’s everything from skin abrasions to joint pain to—no kidding—orthopedic trauma. You can potentially get a fracture of sorts. EVAs on the lunar surface with a heavily loaded suit and heavy loads that you’re either carrying or tools that you’re reacting against, that’s an issue.”

Note: When you see numbers like 300 pounds for these Axiom suits or 185 for the Apollo era suits, divide those by six to estimate what they'll feel like on the moon (100 or 33.8 lb.s) and remember that only applies when lifting the suit in lunar gravity. In the low G (or zero G) environments, the mass feels like the full number (300 or 185) when it's the inertia being felt while moving the weight. That's something they "have to get used to." - SiG 

When comparing specifications, the Axiom suits come across as more capable than the Apollo suits that are 120 lbs lighter. They can support longer spacewalks and provide greater redundancy, and they’re made of modern materials to enhance flexibility and crew comfort. But the longer space (moon) walks are because they have more storage to use, needed because they’re bringing essentials – air, water, waste storage room with them. On the moon they’ll be a slog, Rubins said.

Never forget RA Heinlein’s observation, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or TANSTAAFL. The Axiom suits fly in the face of what astronauts using the Apollo suits concluded – to quote one of them, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who spent 22 hours walking on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972 said. “I’d have that go about four times the mobility, at least four times the mobility, and half the weight,” and if he didn’t say that word directly, it’s pure TANSTAAFL.

“Now, one way you can… reduce the weight is carry less consumables and learn to use consumables that you have in some other vehicle, like a lunar rover. Any time you’re on the rover, you hook into those consumables and live off of those, and then when you get off, you live off of what’s in your backpack. We, of course, just had the consumables in our backpack.”

It’s worth pointing out that the first landing (currently NET 2028) will not have a rover. At present, that’s not expected to go to the moon until “sometime in the 2030s.” That seems to mean they have to live with the 300 lb suits.

“I do crossfit. I do triathlons. I do marathons. I get out of a session in the pool in the NBL (Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory) doing the lunar suit underwater, and I just want to go home and take a nap,” Rubins told the panel. “I am absolutely spent. You’re bruised. This is an extreme physical event in a way that the space station is not.”

The new suits are better than the Apollo suits in some motions – mostly those that are improved by the new joints. That doesn’t include recovering from a fall onto the lunar surface by yourself.

“You’re face down on the lunar surface, and you have to do the most massive, powerful push up to launch you and the entire mass of the suit up off the surface, high enough so you can then flip your legs under you and catch the ground,” Rubins said. “You basically have to kind of do a jumping pushup… This is a risky maneuver we test a whole bunch in training. It’s really non-trivial.”

NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara kneels down to pick up a rock during testing of Axiom's lunar spacesuit inside NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston on September 24, 2025. Credit: NASA

Yes, this is the story I mentioned Monday and said it was too long and involved to get it done in the time I had.  There's more at the Ars Technica source that ended up getting cut, including some meaty aspects of the story and what has been going on. When I try to mentally balance the state where they appear to be and what appear to be possible directions they could go, I keep coming back to that first Axiom story I linked to being nearly four years ago. Is there enough time to do anything beyond simple band-aids?