Chris Carr will be at the second annual Spacesuit Symposium at the 9th Mars Society Conference at held August 3-6, 2006 at L`Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington DC. FYI, I've been busy working on a 1 to 1 model of the High Gain Antenna Boom and a bunch of faux rocks for a new display of the Viking Lander "third body" at the Museum of Flight here in Seattle (moved from the EE at the UW). July 20th I was at a party at MOF to celebrate this gifting by Jim Tillman, the 37th anniversary of Apollo 11 and Viking One's landing 30 years ago. Also, the Pop Sci of August has an short article on Spacesuits...

Spacesuits - Your inflexible friend

July 20th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Sometimes the old ways are the best

IF YOU want to conserve energy, walking rather than running is the best plan. At least, on
Earth it is. However, Christopher Carr, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, has shown in his recent research that for astronauts exploring places with
lower gravity than Earth, the reverse is true. If they run, rather than walk, they can achieve
more in the limited time before their oxygen runs out. They can also travel further from
their spacecraft because, in an emergency, they can get back faster. This discovery calls
into question efforts to design new spacesuits for America's much-vaunted plan to send
people back to the moon, and eventually to Mars.

NASAEr, which way now?

The instinct of engineers at NASA, America's space agency, is to improve on the suits used
three and a half decades ago during the Apollo project by making them less rigid. That
would make them easier to walk in. But pulling this redesign off is tricky, because their
rigidity is a result of their internal pressurisation. In inflatable spacecraft (see article)
rigidity is a good thing. In spacesuits, it has been thought of as bad.

Dr Carr, however, has been reviewing the performance of the Apollo suits by looking at
footage shot on the moon and by studying the astronauts' own thoughts. He thinks the
basic design of the suits—inflexibility and all—is far sounder than any of the proposed
improvements.

After immersing himself in the lunar-landing films and journals, he noticed that although
the inflexibility of the suits did indeed create difficulties for astronauts when they bent
down to collect rock samples, they found the action of running in a suit on the moon as
easy as running on Earth without one. Nor was this a mere personal perception. By
matching recordings of astronauts' oxygen consumption with what the films showed they
were doing at the time, Dr Carr was able to show that their rate of oxygen use was indeed
lower during running than walking.

More at:
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=7188806