The Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment will keep astronauts cool on the lunar surface.
With NASA set to go to the moon as part of its Artemis III missions, it tasked Axiom Space and Prada to create new, high-tech spacesuits. We recently saw how they’ll look on the outside with the chic new Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit suit. Now, Axiom has showed off the LCVG (Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment) inner layer, designed in collaboration with Prada, that will help keep astronauts at a comfortable temperature on the lunar surface.
The LCVG “will be one of the few layers standing between [astronauts] and the unforgiving environment of space,” Axiom wrote. Its job is to remove body heat and expel it into space by circulating water via tubes running throughout the suit across the body’s major muscle groups. It also serves a ventilation function, with separate tubes delivering fresh oxygen to an astronaut’s face to continuously clear exhaled carbon dioxide. Unlike previous spacesuits, the LCVG has a backup cooling circuit if the primary loop fails.
It may sound odd to enlist a haute couture company for a spacesuit design. But Prada does know how to fit garments and brings expertise in “design, pattern making and advanced materials,” the company’s CMO Lorenzo Bertelli said in a statement. Plus, if you’re going to design a new spacesuit from scratch, you might as well make it stylish — provided it doesn’t affect functionality.
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