The first time NASA unveiled a new spacesuit, President John Kennedy was in attendance. It was 1961, and Kennedy had traveled to Cape Canaveral for an inspection tour, where a suit technician with the pitch-perfect name Joe Kosmo was set to model the pressure garment the original seven astronauts would wear during their journeys aloft aboard their tiny Mercury capsules. Kosmo appeared before Kennedy as promised, and demonstrated the ease with which he could bend and flex inside the inflatable suit. He then told the president that the gloves were manipulable enough to allow him to pick up a coin—if only he had one.
Kennedy reached into his pants pocket, took out a quarter, and placed it on the floor. Kosmo bent, plucked it up, and offered it back to Kennedy.
“Keep it,” the president said. “A souvenir.” Half a century later, Kosmo still had the coin.
The latest NASA spaceware unveiled this week did not receive the same attention. There were no heads of state present at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy, when Houston-based aerospace company Axiom Space, and the Italian fashion giant Prada Group debuted their new space suit. The suit is far more elaborate than the long-ago Mercury model and far more expensive, the product of a $228-million contract NASA issued to Axiom in 2022. But there is good reason for the bump in price and complexity: as early as the end of 2026, the spacesuits will be worn at the south pole of the moon by the crew of Artemis III, when they press the first boot prints on the lunar surface since the mission of Apollo 17, in 1972.
“We are pioneering a new era in space exploration where partnerships are imperative to the commercialization of space,” said Russell Ralston, Axiom’s Executive Vice President of Extravehicular Activity (EVA, or lunar spacewalks), in a statement. “For the first time, we are leveraging expertise in other industries to craft a better solution for space.”
The Axiom-Prada partnership started two years ago, shortly after Axiom won its NASA contract. The company tapped Esther Marquis, the costume designer for the Apple TV space series “For All Mankind,” to design the look of the suit, but no sooner was she onboard than Prada reached out with an offer to assist as well. Ralston liked the idea, telling The New York Times that a partnership with a luxury fashion brand “actually makes a lot of sense because a spacesuit is a unique thing.” He tasked Prada with selecting and sourcing materials for the suit and working with Marquis on the overall aesthetics. Meanwhile Axiom engineers developed the insulation, articulated joints, life-support systems, and more that make an extravehicular spacesuit a sort of form-fitting spacecraft.
The suit that resulted from this collaboration is, like the Apollo lunar suits of half a century ago, equal parts awkward and elegant. On Earth, the Apollo models and their accompanying backpacks tipped the scales at 180 lbs., which would have made bounding about the lunar surface in them all-but impossible, if not for the moon’s one-sixth gravity which reduced the load to just 30 lbs. Today’s Artemis-era suits are, if anything, heavier still. Axiom will not reveal their exact weight, as that is proprietary information, but Ralston does say they are a few hundred pounds.
The additional weight is owed partly to the region of the moon Artemis astronauts will be exploring. Unlike the six Apollo landing crews, who explored plains, highlands, and mountains in a more or less equatorial band, the Artemis astronauts will land at the south lunar pole, where ice—which can be harvested for water, breathable oxygen, and hydrogen-oxygen rocket fuel—exists in permanently shadowed craters. Temperatures at the Apollo landing sites ranged from 250°F (121°C) in the glare of the sun to -208°F (-133°C) in the shadows. In the permanently shaded regions of the south pole, the thermometer bottoms out at a far lower -373°F (-225°C). That requires more robust insulation, which adds weight, but also adds time to the astronauts’ field trips. The new suit, said Ralston in an email to TIME, “can perform eight-hour spacewalks, a two-hour increase over Apollo-era EVAs.”
That greater surface time is thanks to the suits’ three-layer design. The innermost layer is a set of full-body long-johns, shot through with tubing that carries cool water from neck to toes to prevent the astronauts from overheating in the raw sunlight. Surrounding the cooling garment is an airtight pressure layer—the portion of the suit that does the true heavy lifting in keeping the astronauts alive in the airless environment of the moon. Surrounding that is the environmental protective garment (EPG), the heavy, visible, outer covering of the suit that protects the astronauts from cuts and punctures on a lunar terrain that bristles with jagged rocks and scarps. Last year, Axiom revealed an early iteration of that outer layer, done up in dark colors to hide other proprietary elements. The model unveiled this week is sewn in its proper white, which will reflect excessive sunlight away to prevent the crew from overheating, as well as making it easier to spot and brush away fine lunar dust, which is notorious for fouling zippers and joints after even a single moonwalk.
The quarter-billion dollar R&D cost will come down as the Artemis program plays out over future landings, and more and more astronauts wear the new suits. Unlike Apollo-era suits, each one of which was measured and cut to the particular astronaut who would be wearing it, the Axiom-Prada suits are modular, with snap-in and snap-out limbs and torsos that accommodate women and men from the 1st percentile in body size to the 99th percentile. Ralston touts this “plug and play adaptability” as an effective way to keep costs down and manufacturing efficiency high.
For viewers back home, it will be the outer layer of the suit, not the guts of it, that will make the biggest impression. Prada’s triangular trademark is not featured on the suit, as it is Axiom that took the lead in the development, but the latter company’s “AX” logo, sewn in gray on the suits’ torso, will be visible, as will its full name on the backpack. As with the Apollo suits, the one the commander wears will include red piping to help distinguish one crew member from the other, since their faces will be obscured by their reflective helmet faceplates. Gray patches sewn to the knees and elbows of the spacesuits both add visual grace notes and protect against cuts and punctures during the inevitable tumbles astronauts make while bunny-hopping across the lunar surface.
“While the knee and elbow pads are designed to enable flexibility and decrease impacts on the suit and the astronaut, the color gray is an aesthetic design choice,” says Ralston. “These pads will include added insulation and robustness against lunar dust.”
Whether NASA can actually make its September 2026 target date for the crewed Artemis III landing is very much open to question. The Artemis II mission, a simple-by-comparison circumlunar journey around the far side of the moon and straight back home, has already been postponed from its original launch date of September 2024 to November 2025 due to budget constraints and challenges in heat shield design. Artemis III, with its requirement of a separate lunar landing vehicle that has not even gotten out of the very preliminary design phase, much less been built, flown, and tested, will be hard pressed to launch in two years.
The betting here is that American boots will indeed return to the moon, but not before the end of this decade. Still, when that mission does fly, the matter of what the crews will wear has at least been thoughtfully, artfully, gracefully settled.
