Oy…
- They didn’t know that the large-sized torso section was going to be a problem until last Friday, when Anne McClain first tried an EVA in the large-torso suit (this all-female EVA was booked months ago).
- They have an extra medium-sized torso section available, but they would need to disassemble the whole EVA suit and reassemble it to in order use that section.
- There’s not a lot of extra space on the station to store things they don’t think they’ll need (and, again, they thought McClain was going to be able to use the large suit).
I don’t know how long it takes to disassemble the large suit and reassemble it as a medium suit, but, given the complexity of these suits, I wouldn’t be surprised if three days would be pushing it.
Yeah the article I read explained the complexity of the choices. They could reconfigure a suit but it would take time away from the mission and both women are getting to space walk, just not together.
A very good article on the space suit sitch.
It’s such an odd thing, because I do appreciate the problem. But we’re used to such hyperbolic and staggering waste with the military that it seems weird that NASA doesn’t just have warehouses of them.
Well. Probably on earth but there’s not like a giant wardrobe storage on the space vehicle.
According to Ars, the current total number of operational EVA suits is 11, most of which are on the ground.
True, but it does make me wonder how far ahead this EVA was planned. As in, did they make the announcement before they took stock of the suits?
Could this be a PR ruse to get more funding for suits?
(C’mon, it’s not a NASA thread without a conspiracy theory.)
- They made the announcement in 2018.
- When training on the ground, McClain said that she would be able to use either the medium or the large torso.
- Because of the way bodies change in space (legs get smaller, torso gets bigger), they decided to go with the larger size
- Last Friday, during McClain’s first EVA using the large torso, she determined that she should be using the medium torso.
So, it’s not so much that they made the announcement before they took stock of the suits, but that they made the announcement with an idea of what the right suits would be, and then learned otherwise.
Hrmmph… amateurs!
Another view of the story. They need some new suits.
They learned this before with cockpit design. In ww2, fighter cockpits were designed for averaged people. They literally took the average of all measurements. They found that average didn’t really exist. After the war it became important given the gees and shaking and rattling and force needed for the controls. It had been important before but the casualties hadn’t been.
Between that and their tendency to explode or otherwise fall out of the sky, fighters got super dangerous until they figured out how to customize the cockpit, refine hydraulic controls, etc.
In the 80s and nineties they had to go through it all again, with the same arguments, for women. An EVA suit is the same thing again.
Thread:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00895-3
About time someone started looking at the differences instead of assuming we’re all men.