Axiom Space and Prada unveil next-gen lunar spacesuit's inner layer at NYC event

Hey space fans, it's Chelsea here and I'm in New York at Prada. Prada and Axiom Space today have unveiled the liquid cooling and ventilation garment that will be a part of their spacesuit. This is the spacesuit that Artemis astronauts will be wearing on the moon's surface. So this garment is going to make sure that they are temperature controlled and safe. So let's check out. So today was a huge day for Axiom and for Axiom's partnership with Prada. Could you tell me about the brand new garment as part of the brand new spacesuits that Axiom is working on? Yes, we're very excited to be here today with Prada revealing our liquid cooling and ventilation garment. This is the garment that astronauts wear inside the suit. It provides them comfort, cooling and those kinds of things. So really proud of the design and where we're at. Amazing. So obviously this is a really important garment for not just the comfort, but for the safety of the astronauts. What went into the design? What was under consideration? So there's a lot of things that go into this to the design of this garment because it has to do a couple of things. So when you're inside the spacesuit, you can be in there for a very long time, several hours, you know, eight hours, 10 hours, et cetera. And so it needs to provide a level of comfort around the rest of the system, the rest of the spacesuit that's here inside. But as you mentioned, it does provide cooling to the astronauts. So what we have is we have tubes in the garment and you run chilled water through those tubes at a different rate essentially. And you can adjust the level of cooling that they get to keep them comfortable. And that's necessary because if you didn't have that garment, it would get quite hot inside very quickly. And that's what we want to avoid. So this garment is really a step forward in many ways. The first thing I would mention is we're using some pretty innovative materials. And this is where Prada helped out is if you look at the garment and the color of it, it looks like one piece of fabric, one yarn. It's not, it's actually several different ones combined in a particular way that give us different performance properties that we're looking for out of the garment. Because you're providing cooling to the astronaut, we want to make sure that that cooling is evenly distributed. We want to make sure it's comfortable, that it's not too cold in one spot and there's not cooling in another spot, those kinds of things. So the materials that we're using and the way we've constructed those materials is quite unique. The other thing is that the manufacturing method we're using is inherently customizable. So because a spacesuit needs to accommodate all sorts of different people, it's important that we produce this garment in a way that also accommodates all those different people. So there's many things like that, that this kind of takes a step forward on.