MMM Classics Year 10: MMM #s 91-100 - Moon Society

Spacesuit Aversion
The quest for alternatives
to a user-unfriendly interface
by Peter Kokh
Relevant Readings from Back Issues of MMM
MMM # 5 MAY ‘87, “M is for Middoors”
MMM # 49 SEP ‘91, p 4 “Visiting Amphibious Vehicle”
MMM # 53 MAR ‘92, pp 4-6 “Xity Plans”
MMM # 89 OCT ‘95, p 6 “Dock-Locks; Buppets”
Bryce Walden, Oregon Moonbase (bwalden@aol.com) writes:
“Sorry I don't have a firm attribution for this. It's a short note I
took down while channel-hopping a couple of years ago. The
speaker was an astronaut with some experience in a spacesuit,
and he listed the "Five Worse Things About A Spacesuit:"
(1) You can't blow your nose.
(2) You can't comb your hair.
(3) You can't read your watch.
(4) You can't eat regular food.
(5) You can't scratch an itch.
I suspect that the first and last complaints will be the
most irksome, but also that these are just the handy lightning
rods for an overall discomfort with what must be even to the
most adept and practiced, an unnatural way to interface with an
admittedly hostile environment. For that is just what a spacesuit
is, an interface with vacuum, with temperature extremes,
and with the slow micrometeorite rain. Against other dangers
of the alien environment, like cosmic rays and solar flares, it
offers almost no protection at all.
The real point is that existing suits (at least) are not
easy to don or doff, are cumbersome to get around in, interfere
with free natural motion, and make manipulation difficult and
clumsy. Where different pressures and atmospheric mixes are
used in the spacesuit than in the habitat or vehicle supporting
the sortie, pre-breathing is necessary, adding patiently or
impatiently wasted hours before and after the venture in which
little useful or satisfying can be accomplished. Spacesuits add
to, rather than diminish the degree of difficulty and exertion the
called for activity would of itself entail.
Improvements are certainly possible. The constant
volume hard suit would eliminate any prebreathing requirement
and, if, as we have suggested, entry to and egress from
the suit were made from a turtle-shell life-support pack backed
into a conformal docking port, the whole airlock ritual with its
wasteful exhausting of precious habitat atmosphere in each
cycling, could be engineered out of existence. [cf. MMM # 90,
NOV ‘95, “Dust Control”]. NASA may not feel the need, but
frontier pioneers will soon demand such a development.
But why use spacesuits at all?
(1) Vehicles can dock directly with other vehicles and
with habitats or other pressurized facilities, allowing “shirtsleeve”
access from anywhere to anywhere else.
(2) At any given settlement or development site, all
pressurized facilities will run more efficiently if they are interconnected
via pressurized passageways and streets - save
where activity with some risk of cross contamination requires
prudent isolation. And such interconnection will create a larger
shared mini-biosphere with greater forgiveness and buffering.
If the outpost or settlement is wisely designed, much
routine outside activity such as system maintenance, vehicle
maintenance, replacing volatile tanks, etc. can be done under
the protection of a radiation shielding canopy or ramada. This
would allow lighter-weight suits, more comfortable to wear,
easier to get around in, and easier to manipulate through - a
more user friendly vacuum-work interface.
And for field work? The turtle back suits will disencumber
crew vehicles of the more massive airlock apparatus.
But personal one-man wheeled or walking vehicles with feedback
or virtual-reality-operated manipulators (“buppets” for
body puppet, after muppet for mitten puppet), will again allow
shirtsleeve comfort and freedom of motion as well as less
restrictive personal activity for the occupant/driver/wearer.
The motivation and incentive to develop such replacement
hardware will be strongly felt among those engaged in
longer tours of duty, and considering “reupping” for duty tour
extensions. As the “outpost interface” begins to morph into a
“settlement incubator”, the demand for such hardware will
squelch all bean-counting objections.
Predictably, there will be those few who need to feed
their macho “rugged outvacsman” image. Singly, or in small
groups, they will put on suits and go outside to do their thing,
ride around on lunar Harley hogs, go mountain climbing or
whatever. Maybe they will have annual rebel outvac picnics at
which they can pretend they are feeding their helmeted faces
with roasted ribs and buttered corn on the cob after doing the
three-legged race and the raw egg toss. Perhaps they’ll promote
an amendment to guarantee their right to bear spacesuits.
Seriously, there will be genuine and worthwhile activities
providing both adventure and challenge and which do
require a spacesuit — like exploring a lavatube complex. Lunar
spelunkers are sure to become a proud and exclusive fraternity,
luring many a young kid with wanderlust and dreams of
becoming a famous discoverer.
And there will be daredevils too, who in spacesuits,
may try to walk a tightrope across a rille without a net, or free
wheel down a mountain slope (look ma, no brakes) in an effort
to see if there is after all some lunar equivalent of a terminal
velocity in vacuum, and if so just how high it might be.
For most Lunans, visitors or settlers, wearing a
spacesuit will simply not be an acceptable modus vivendi. Any
sense of novelty, for kids or newcomers, will quickly wear
thin. Face it, the spacesuit, as much as we take it for granted, is
a quaint uncomfortable activity restricting contraption doomed
to become a Flintsone-like anachronism.
The space suit will always be part of lunar frontier
lore. But the stubborn situations which demand its use will be
fewer and fewer as time goes by. As a result, it will quickly
fade from everyday lunar life. Perhaps every able bodied lunan
will still put one on now and then. But the occasion will be the
semiannual depressurization drill, much like our school days
fire drills, or lifeboat drills the first day out on some oceangoing
or spacefaring cruise ship.
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 57