Safe, affordable pressure suits are a critical, enabling technology for commercial spaceflight. Cost reductions are especially important for suborbital spaceflight, where the ticket prices will be about an order of magnitude lower.

Some progress has been made in this area. Orbital Outfitters and the David Clark Company have produced prototype suits for suborbital spaceflight. A new company, Final Frontier Design, recently unveiled its prototype and even held a successful Kickstarter campaign.

This progress, while promising, is not sufficient. David Clark has a great of experience building pressure suits for NASA and the military, dating all the way back to the Bell X-1, but has never delivered a commercial spacesuit. (The company does have a great deal of experience delivering commercial products in other areas, however, especially its highly successful aviation headsets.) The other companies are startups, with a strong commercial orientation, but have not yet delivered a suit that’s actually flown in space.

A healthy industry needs to have multiplier suppliers for critical components like spacesuits. A single source would lead to monopoly pricing and leave the industry vulnerable to single-point failures due to a natural disaster, product recall, or business failure. Two suppliers are better, but a single failure would still put the industry right back in a monopoly situation. For the long-term health of the industry, at least three viable suppliers are preferable.

Right now, most impartial observers would put the number of proven suppliers at about one and a half.

One way to address this problem is a prize for low-cost spacesuit development.

Challenge history

Some of our staff members came up with the idea for a Low-Cost Spacesuit Challenge and persuaded NASA to back the idea, in 2006. The idea won approval from the highest levels of NASA and the White House Office of Management and Budget, making it into the President’s budget request. The Challenge would have offered a $500,000 prize for the first company to successful build and market a low-cost spacesuit suitable for commercial use. Unfortunately, Congress (specifically the Senate) decided not to provide any funding for Centennial Challenges in the FY2007 budget, and The Low-Cost Spacesuit Challenge died as a result.

Designing the challenge was a bit tricky. The problem is determining whether an entry meets the low-cost goal. Cost is a criterion that’s easy to cheat, if the contest isn’t designed properly. NASA (quite rightly) did not want to get involved in auditing a company’s books to determine how much a suit cost. It needed some sort of proxy which was correlated with cost but easier to measure.

We offered two possible solutions. One was touch labor. Labor is the biggest cost component for most aerospace products, including spacesuits. We propose that NASA’s judges observe the construction process and measure the number of man-hours required to build the suit, starting with raw materials and standard commercially available components. Given standards labor rates, that should provide a fair first-order approximation of the suit cost.

The other solution was for the Challenge to set a target price for a suit and require the prize winner to offer a specified minimum number of suits for sale at that price. That requirement removes any incentive for a competitor to cheat. If competitor brings in an expensive suit as a “ringer,” he will lose more than the value of the prize by selling suits below cost.

NASA chose the second approach. The draft rules, which NASA published in 2006, appear at the bottom of this article.

Challenge today

We still think the Low-Cost Spacesuit Challenge has merit. We hope that NASA or some other organization (DARPA, perhaps, or FAA) decides to revive it. Various members of Congress have expressed public concerns about spaceflight safety, but they haven’t done anything constructive about it. Creating a Low-Cost Spacesuit Challenge to spur the development of safe, low-cost spacesuits would do more for spaceflight safety than any other single action Congress might take.

If we were asked to design a Low-Cost Spacesuit Challenge today, we would probably recommend some changes to the 2006 approach. Back then, NASA planned a “first to complete” competition with the money going to the first company that met the specified goal. That approach made sense in 2006, because no one was sure if we would have even one qualified supplier. Today, the objective is to promote healthy competition and bring down costs. Instead of “first to complete,” it would make sense to have a head-to-head competition, with teams competing to produce the lowest-cost suit. Given this type of competition, it would probably make more sense to use the labor-hours criteria. (We’d probably keep the market-sale requirement, as well, as an extra check against cheating.

Getting government funding for such a prize might be extremely difficult in the present environment. Congress has not looked favorably on Centennial Challenge budget requests for several years now. The focus of the Centennial Challenges program has also changed, subtly, in recent years. It now has an explicit goal to “drive progress in aerospace technology of value to NASA’s missions,” rather than the needs of the nation. It might be easier to find prize funding from a private organization. (X-Prize Foundation? Discovery Channel?)