HOW TO MAKE A SPACESUIT

The high stakes and low budget of Smith’s pressure suit makes its prospects as a life support system as impressive as they are unnerving. For all intents and purposes, spacesuits are basically just personal spacecraft. They’re often the only thing separating an astronaut from a grisly death and even minor system failures can be catastrophic. Each suit has to fulfill the same life support functions that you’d find in a rocket or on board the International Space Station: It must shield its occupant from solar radiation and exposure to the extreme temperatures of space, maintain a pressure similar to that found on sea level on Earth, and recycle carbon dioxide, but must also be versatile enough to allow astronauts to perform their duties in microgravity.

There are two main types of spacesuits: Intravehicular activity (IVA) suits worn inside spacecraft, and those worn outside for extravehicular activities (EVA). IVA spacesuits are mostly there as a backup in case of an emergency, like the sudden loss of pressure in a spacecraft. This makes them inherently simpler since they don’t have to account for things like radiation exposure and the gloves can just be rubber gloves similar to those you might use to wash your dishes.

“I have no interest in Low Earth Orbit.”

Gloves are often regarded as one of the most complicated parts of a spacesuit because when the spacesuit is pressurized it can make the gloves incredibly cumbersome to use unless they are made from exotic materials and manufacturing techniques. Yet in an IVA suit, pressurized gloves only need to be able to handle simple tasks like pulling levers or turning knobs, which don’t require the dexterity demanded by gloves used outside of a spacecraft for more complex tasks so they can be made from relatively common materials.

Smith’s spacesuit falls somewhere between an EVA and an IVA suit. On the one hand, it will have to maintain pressure and oxygen levels to allow Smith to fly above 60,000 feet, but on the other hand it won’t have to account for other perils of space travel, such as radiation exposure — yet. Smith said his ultimate goal with the suit is to see it used on the surface of Mars.

“I just have to say it, I have no interest in Low Earth Orbit,” Smith told me. “I want to know what it is going to be like on a new planet, so I’m focusing on making a suit to explore the surface of Mars.”

Kristian von Bengston of Copenhagen Suborbitals installs Cameron Smith in a mock up of CopSub’s Tycho capsule for an escape test in 2013. Image: Travis Stanton / Sarah Taylor / Collection of Pacific Spaceflight

In the past few months, Smith has successfully taken his latest suit — the Mark VII — out and “clamored around on rocks” in Oregon to test its durability. But before he got to this point it took years of R&D just to figure out how to how to get the suit to hold pressure.

When he first started out, Smith knew very little about spacesuit technology. He leaned heavily on NASA’s technical reports server, which hosts all of the declassified documents detailing the agency’s research over the past half century. By spending his nights poring over these reports and reading the hundreds of patents that came out of the Apollo era until his eyes were bleeding, Smith came to learn the fundamentals of spacesuit design, construction and testing. All that was left was to figure out how to adapt these insights to a shoestring budget.

When I spoke to Smith I suggested that understanding the complexity of spacesuits would likely be enough to make most people abandon the idea of building their own as hopeless, but he dismissed my doubts out of hand.