June 28, 2011
Obviously an astronaut has much more to consider than fashion in the spacesuits they wear on spacewalks and during space travel. At a recent talk by alumnus Terry Hill (BS ASE '96, MS ASE '98), as part of Space Week Texas 2011, students learned just how much actually goes into the design of the remarkable apparel designed to sustain an astronaut's life functions and protect him or her from the many threats encountered in space exploration.
"As a good engineer, you want to design a work of art - the most compact, the most efficient, the lightest suit - and it is beautiful," said Hill, the Engineering Project Manager for the Constellation Space Suit Program (2005-2010) at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "But if you're designing for the government, you're going to be using that suit design and hardware for 30 years, and you need to be sure it can be maintained, and sometimes maintained by people who did not originally design the hardware."
This is one of the many considerations Hill himself has discovered while a team member of JSC's International Space Station (ISS) / Shuttle Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) Space Suit Team. Several dozen students from the full range of engineering majors attended his talk "Designing for Exploration-Class Space Suits" on March 28.
Along with an extensive Powerpoint presentation, Hill brought along for display one of the white EMU suits as he talked about their need to meet the challenges of severe temperature ranges, different kinds of abrasive dust, mobility and mass fluctuations, radiation exposure, reduced gravity and microgravity. One key to a successful suit, he said, is its versatility for a variety of space missions.
"We should be able to design a suit that can be modified so we don't have to redesign the suit each time we go into space," he said. He described the new suit architecture developed in the Constellation Program that has a core suit with "plug-and-play" modules that can be snapped on or off according to what task the astronaut needs to do or environment they are asked to work in.
This versatility in effective space suits in some ways mirrors the versatility Hill said his aerospace degree provided him because the suit's design requires the expertise of every major engineering discipline.
"We've got to have all the engineering disciplines show up to the party to get a good suit," Hill said. "So it was good to personally have a broad, expansive overview of engineering so I could talk the language of each discipline."
Hill also explained past failures and accidents in space suit design where engineers learned hard lessons, such as an engineer who was severely burned when he opened an oxygen valve and the top half of the suit vaporized in a flash fire.
"People's lives depend on your understanding of the laws of physics and your understanding of engineering ethics as well as the functionality of what you’re designing," he said.
Following the talk was a Q&A in the WRW building where Hill spoke more informally with students and offered insights into how to apply engineering problem-solving principles to solving the question of where students might want to end up a decade from now.
"I thought he had a very down-to-earth perspective and he gave some interesting real-life insight into how to solve problems," said aerospace engineering senior Kit Kennedy. "It was useful to hear about how we can apply our skills to different problems and to hear what employees are looking for."
