When an astronaut needs a new part for his or her space suit, NASA doesn’t just grab something off the shelf at Cape Canaveral’s big box hardware store. Replacement pieces are tested, retested and then tested again before they go into a suit.
At ILC Dover, which manufactures the suits at its plant in Frederica, four very ordinary people are spending the next few months working with engineers to see if they can wear out an integral part of what has been described as a mini-spacecraft.
In this case, they’re testing a special rubberized cloth that makes up the bladder for the suit. This vital layer retains pressurized air, keeping the astronaut from suffocating in the vacuum of space.
The supplier changed its formula for making the urethane-coated nylon material, meaning ILC has to put the substitute through rigorous testing to ensure it’s as durable as the original. Other parts of the suit rub and chafe against the bladder, meaning it could wear out and fail.
“If this replacement material turns out not to be as good as the original, we don’t want to find out when the astronauts are 250 miles up,” said ILC spokesman Bill Ayrey, who has worn and tested ILC’s suits many times himself.
“That’s never happened, which is why we do this testing,” he added.
Checking out new components is a time consuming but temporary job, which is why ILC went to a job placement agency to recruit its suit testers. They include Kim Landis of Dover, wife of a Dover Air Force Base officer and mother of two; Brett Sampson of Georgetown, a meat cutter; Ron Pippin of Greensboro, Md., a retired ILC employee and Air Force retiree Thomas Sylvester of Hartly.
But this quartet didn’t just walk in off the street. Other than height and weight requirements, they also have to be physically fit enough to perform more than 800 repetitive motions designed put wear and tear on the bladder material. It’s something they do every day, five days a week, for five months.
That’s a substantial amount of physical work, not to mention the fact it’s done while carrying around approximately 120 pounds, the weight of the suit and the backpack.
Team effort
Although they only had been together a few days before this testing session, the suit testers quickly meshed as a team. Each takes turns putting the suit through its paces, while the others monitor its life support systems, keeps detailed notes on each test and helps the person in the suit.
This day, Landis is first up. She appears in the doorway of ILC’s testing lab clad in a pair of long underwear covered in a series of tiny plastic hoses. The hoses circulate water throughout the suit to keep her, and astronauts working in 350-degree sunlight, cool.
With help from her comrades, Landis pulls on the suit’s legs and waistband and then climbs into the upper torso, which is on a wall-mounted pallet. Gloves and the helmet are next, plus a check to make sure the cooling and communications systems are in order.
“It’s difficult,” Sampson notes from his own experiences. “They have to shove me in there sometimes. I imagine it’s like putting on a suit of armor.”
With suiting up complete, Landis shuffles to the middle of the room as Sylvester and Pippin guide her along – the suit is quite cumbersome in Earth’s gravity – to make sure she doesn’t trip. Sampson keeps an eye on suit systems from a nearby monitoring station.
“I feel fine,” she announces. “I’m ready to go to work.”
And she does. She flexes elbows and shoulder joints, twists and turns at the waist, bends her knees and pushes pedals, simulating just about every physical move an astronaut might make. Some moves require only seven repetitions; others she must do over and over and over, up to 250 times.
“How’s my water?” she asks about halfway through the program. “It’s warm in here.”
Sampson makes an adjustment to increase the cooling inside the suit, and Landis continues on.
Cut off from the sounds of the outside world, Landis only can hear the faint rush of air through the oxygen system and a slight metallic sound from bearings inside the suit.
Except for testing-related chatter, there’s little conversation while she’s working. She goes through each exercise silently, determinedly counting each repetition, but her labored breathing over the headset gives away the effort she’s putting into the job.
It’s not just the weight of the suit that makes the work hard, it’s the pressure. Being inside a space suit is like trying to force a bend in a pressurized fire hose. Even though built-in joints and harnesses help, an astronaut or a suit tester still must work against air pressure that wants to keep the joint from bending.
After almost an hour, Landis finishes for the morning and moves back to the wall pallet where Sylvester and Pippin start snapping off her gloves and helmet. Despite the workout and earlier comment about the suit temperature, Landis has barely broken a sweat, thanks to her liquid-cooled longjohns.
“I feel good,” she said after her helmet is removed. “I love it in there.”
As for the thought of someday going into space herself, Landis demurs, saying she’d prefer to leave that job to the real astronauts.
“I don’t think I’m ready to take go that next step,” she admits.
