Re: Moon Dust Threat?



Pat Flannery wrote:

Seriously (you're coming up with some pretty good lines of recent), I wouldn't be at all surprised if what the come up with is some sort of fairly cheap over-suit that covers the actual suit, and you dispose of after a few EVAs.
Say something made out of woven glass fiber to prevent degradation or boil-off in vacuum and hard UV.

To get some idea of what that would be like, here's the orange coverall that Yuri Gagarin wore over his actual Vostok pressure suit: http://www.zvezda-npp.ru/images/04_3.jpg
If you can protect the inner suit from damage by the lunar soil, you can afford to spend a lot more on it.
Pressure suit gloves would be protected by over-gloves that were tough; boots would be inside of something like a overshoe that would be able to take many miles of walking before the soles wore down.
You do this right and the disposable part of the suit could be fairly cheap and light...say ten pounds per change, if even that?
Unlike the pressure suit proper, exact fit wouldn't be that critical. It could be done in XS/S/M/L/XL sizes for all of its parts (other than possibly the boots), and would fit both male and female astronauts well via a combination of the various parts in various sizes.


Pat
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