Just because NASA has stopped flying manned space missions doesn’t mean it wants to stop developing the suit that will be used to walk on the moon. Last month, NASA asked the public to vote on three versions of its next-generation spacesuit design, the
Z-2, and now it has a winner: “technology,” a gray uniform with glowing patches of turquoise on its upper and lower torso.
The new design, a subtle homage to spacesuits of yore, is a follow-up to 2012’s Z-1, a Buzz Lightyear-esque getup that won accolades, including being named one of
the year’s best inventions by Time. It was also the first major overhaul of the spacewalking suit in about three decades, featuring a soft, flexible body for greater astronaut mobility.
This year the NASA team returned to the hard composite torso of previous iterations, finding in testing that the Z-1’s flexibility also created restrictions, such as a smaller allowable torso size. Such engineering details were worked out internally, but to decide on the surface details, the space organization turned to its patrons: American taxpayers. The winning design, dubbed “technology,” uses Luminex wire and light-emitting patches that could be customized to help identify individual crewmembers.