The Human Factors discipline overlaps with many other communities including engineering, medicine, physiology, psychology and operations management. Consequently the SHFE Project members interface regularly with researchers and practitioners in these companion disciplines, both within and outside NASA. The activities of the SHFE Project members range from such topics as basic research on human vision, modeling and biomechanics to applied research and development of analysis tools and design requirements to support human space flight. The operational challenges that attract the attention of human factors specialists include such diverse topics as space vehicle layout, space suit design, controls and displays, labeling, communication facilities, distributed team structures, emergency medical procedures and crewmember activity scheduling. The media for these research and development
activities are also varied. They include specialized laboratories, space flight analogs, training simulators and operational space vehicles. Much of the current focus attempts to predict the behavior and performance of crewmembers and their support teams on long duration missions by extrapolation from current short and intermediate duration experiences.

peer1.nasaprs.com/peer_review/ prog/shfe_proj_impl_plan.pdf

(questions ask of a ILC Dover tech)

Q: Is the suit too heavy for training on earth?

A: When training on earth, the astronauts use special lightweight parts and they do a lot of training in water (a large pool called a Weightless Environment Test Facility)...