NASA Searches for New Spacesuit Tailors

By Tariq Malik
Staff Writer
posted: 1 October 2007
4:36 p.m. ET

NASA is looking for a new space tailor to design and build the spacesuits to be worn by
future astronauts as they bounce around the surface of the moon.

The U.S. agency called on prospective spacesuit designers Tuesday to submit proposals
for spaceworthy duds flexible enough to allow astronauts to work outside NASA's future
Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) or on the lunar surface.

NASA plans to award a contract for the new spacesuits in June 2008, and fly them aboard
the first piloted Orion capsule missions to the International Space Station (ISS).

"We'd want to have them there even if we didn't plan to do a contingency spacewalk from
the spacecraft," NASA spokesperson Brandi Dean, of the agency's Johnson Space Center in
Houston, Texas, told SPACE.com.

More at:http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/071001-nasa-newspacesuits.html