Space suits are complex equipment, requiring thousands of man hours for the construction of just a single suit. Prior to the Apollo mission, suits individually made for eachastronaut's body. Contemporary suits assembled in a far are more efficient manner, adopting an “off-the-rack” approach. NASA's Space Suit Evolution report discusses in detail the design changes employed by ILC Dover Corporation over the years.
To accommodate the 120 men and women serving in the shuttle astronaut corps, space suits are made from modular components; they are assembled from variety of sized pieces made to fit multiple body sizes. There is no differentiation between gender, men and women use the same equipment that's suitable for their individual size.
The astronauts' bodies are measured at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and compared to the size range of available space suit parts. Once the measurements are in order, the training suit is assembled nine months prior to the mission. The flight suit itself is assembled and tested four months prior to the mission.
Advance notice is required because each suit is assembled from scratch by sewing and cementing various materials together, and then joining the parts together with metal parts. The modules themselves are made from a range of materials: ortho-fabric, aluminized mylar, neoprene-coated nylon, Dacron, urethane-coated nylon, tricot, nylon/spandex, stainless steel, and high strength composite materials. The end result is a shuttle suit weighing 310 lbs.
Combining this hefty weight with the astronaut's own body weight renders an approximate 480 lbs, far too heavy to allow any sort of mobility. For this reason, astronauts train in an underwater pool called the Weight Environment Test Facility. To reproduce the weightless conditions astronauts feel in space, scientists rely on counter forces; the buoyancy caused by pressurized breathing air pulls astronauts to the surface of the water and weights attached to their waist pull them downward.
During long hours of operations, astronauts cannot remove their suits to relieve excretory functions, so a Maximum Absorbency Garment (MAG) is worn beneath the space suit. It is incredibly absorbent material able to hold two liters of urines, blood, or feces.
Image extracted from the Space Suit Evolution Report.
The entire report discussing each component of the space suit can be downloaded below. Courtesy of NASA.
By Maximilian Teodorescu
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