Advanced Technology Infusion into Spacesuit Systems

Advancement in technology drives our future. The successful implementation of a technology drives its
possibilities. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has invested in numerous
technologies that have proved to be successful. The desire is to learn from those successes. For a technology to
evolve, become a reality, and infuse into NASA’s missions, a compilation of success-oriented factors must exist
for the technology to reach fruition. Understanding these factors could help decrease the complexity of
technology infusion and bridge the gap between technology developers and system integrators. The knowledge
gained could facilitate the design, development, test, and infusion of a technology to be more effective and
efficient. Successful technology infusion is complex and can be even more daunting when advanced technologies
are infused into complicated systems. NASA, industry, and academia desire to understand the infusion process,
along with measuring the success of infusing an advanced technology into a complex system. This paper focuses
on complicated systems that necessitate successful infusion of technologies. These systems include NASA’s
spacesuits used for extravehicular activity, including the Apollo Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), the
Shuttle/International Space Station EMU, and the Exploration EMU (xEMU) architectures. Several life
support technologies will be addressed in the xEMU. Those technologies will be discussed, along with a
methodology for assessing infusion pathways. The infusion pathways of these life support technologies into
spacesuit architectures can form the benchmark for technology infusion into other architectures for lunar and
Martian surfaces. The spacesuit system architectures as case studies can provide the foundation of technical
knowledge to help NASA and industry’s project managers and system managers integrate advanced
technologies more effectively and efficiently.