Photo: ESA
As things stand today, the European Space Agency, for all its merits, does not have a spacesuit of its own design. And that’s a shame, because for one you can’t do space exploration without a suit, and secondly, you can’t be a space agency of ESA’s size and borrow stuff from your partners.
On track to defining its place on the space exploration stage, ESA does plan to have its own spacesuit sometime in the not-so-distant future. And to make sure everybody knows that, the agency launched back in February 2023 the Space Suit Design Competition.
The call for ideas was open to anyone interested in taking a shot at becoming famous, and only required people to design their spacesuits in the virtual world, not actually put one together. There weren’t all that many technical requirements, and that kind of makes the entire exercise one of design, and not engineering.
Sure, all such space garments were to include the backpack holding the life support systems and a visor meant to filter various lighting conditions. They also had to show they were capable of supporting pressurization, but the main requirements were, as ESA says, the “visual identity and branding rather than the technical details.”
The competition ended on February 28, and soon after a jury of ESA people began looking at the over 90 entries submitted. It took them this long no narrow that list down to 19 entries, and later down to the winning five.
At the time of writing, some details on only one of five suits were made public (you can have a look at the rest of them in the attached gallery). It was designed by a guy named Alberto Piovesan, and it’s all about “simplicity and equilibrium.” It’s a blue and white piece, the colors of the European Space Agency, with all the proper logos displayed in all of the most visible locations. Something that, to be fair, all the others have as well.
What we see in the main photo of this piece is however not what we'll get in the real world. That’s because the jury is now working to integrate elements of all five winning ideas into a single suit, different from all the other five.
Sadly, this final design won’t spawn something that will actually be used for going to space, at least not in the foreseeable future. What the mashup between the five ideas will be used for is to create replicas for exhibition purposes. There’s even a chance we’ll see these replicas featured in some sci-fi flicks of the near future.
Further down the line, an evolution of this unified design will probably be used for training purposes, and only after that there’s a chance we’ll see it worn in space, on the Moon, or on Mars, by a European astronaut.
So, exciting as it was, this competition still hasn’t created a spacesuit for ESA, who will still have to borrow from others. But it is, undoubtedly, a step in the right direction.
The call for ideas was open to anyone interested in taking a shot at becoming famous, and only required people to design their spacesuits in the virtual world, not actually put one together. There weren’t all that many technical requirements, and that kind of makes the entire exercise one of design, and not engineering.
Sure, all such space garments were to include the backpack holding the life support systems and a visor meant to filter various lighting conditions. They also had to show they were capable of supporting pressurization, but the main requirements were, as ESA says, the “visual identity and branding rather than the technical details.”
The competition ended on February 28, and soon after a jury of ESA people began looking at the over 90 entries submitted. It took them this long no narrow that list down to 19 entries, and later down to the winning five.
At the time of writing, some details on only one of five suits were made public (you can have a look at the rest of them in the attached gallery). It was designed by a guy named Alberto Piovesan, and it’s all about “simplicity and equilibrium.” It’s a blue and white piece, the colors of the European Space Agency, with all the proper logos displayed in all of the most visible locations. Something that, to be fair, all the others have as well.
What we see in the main photo of this piece is however not what we'll get in the real world. That’s because the jury is now working to integrate elements of all five winning ideas into a single suit, different from all the other five.
Sadly, this final design won’t spawn something that will actually be used for going to space, at least not in the foreseeable future. What the mashup between the five ideas will be used for is to create replicas for exhibition purposes. There’s even a chance we’ll see these replicas featured in some sci-fi flicks of the near future.
Further down the line, an evolution of this unified design will probably be used for training purposes, and only after that there’s a chance we’ll see it worn in space, on the Moon, or on Mars, by a European astronaut.
So, exciting as it was, this competition still hasn’t created a spacesuit for ESA, who will still have to borrow from others. But it is, undoubtedly, a step in the right direction.
Google News