NASA Extravehicular Activity Technology Roadmaps for Exploration - 2025 Status

As National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sets its goals toward Earth’s Moon and Mars, a spacesuit design tolerable of gravity, dust and Mars’s atmosphere will be needed. NASA has used roadmaps as the means of documenting actionable plans for strategizing technology developments needed to meet NASA’s missions. In 2024, NASA created extravehicular activity (EVA) technology roadmaps for the Moon to Mars (M2M) strategy. These roadmaps visualize an actionable path to EVA capabilities needed for Mars exploration. Although technologies have been developed and matured over the decades to advance EVA systems, technology gaps remain. Over the last 15 years, major steps were taken to advance the technology with the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) government reference design at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas. The xEMU builds on the lessons learned of the Apollo, Space Shuttle, and International Space Station (ISS) EMUs, evolving the technology to increase performance for extreme environments. To help create and sustain a presence on the Moon, NASA procured EVA services from industry through the Exploration EVA Services (xEVAS) contract. Certified vendors were contracted to provide spacesuits, tools, equipment, vehicle interfaces, and support to training and real-time operations. NASA will now focus on sustained human lunar surface exploration and a mission to Mars. NASA leadership has set goals and objectives related to the Agency’s vision and a M2M strategy. This paper presents the EVA Spacesuit technology roadmap with alignment to NASA’s vision.