A less-than-heavily funded program here at Ames solved a lot of these problems with their hardsuit program. I don't have exact details on the progress with the glove problem, but they licked most of the others.

I have no problem with looking for radical new ideas--that's what research is for. I find that re-inventing Apollo after thirty years doesn't really fall into that category.

NASA isn't about producing product. It's about paying people to develop complicated systems and keeping research facilities humming. Nobody in NASA is going to be happy about somebody pulling a completed concept off a shelf and saying "just build this."