NASA Extravehicular Activity Technology Roadmaps for Exploration - 2025 Status

As the 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 has procured EVA services from industry through the Exploration EVA Services (xEVAS) contract. NASA will now focus on sustained human lunar surface exploration and a mission to Mars. Therefore, the technology development and detailed design to enable the sustaining class lunar missions, as well as later missions to Mars, are still under NASA’s purview and responsibility. NASA’s leadership has set goals and objectives related to the Agency’s vision and a M2M strategy. This paper covers the maturation and development of the spacesuit technology and updates the EVA technology roadmap for the M2M Program in alignment with NASA’s vision