EX-1A, la tuta spaziale del futuro anteriore

di taldeital 18—Apr—2011 / 8:04 PM

The Space Suit of the Week is the EX-1A! In the video above, you can see Bill Elkins, the man largely responsible for the suit, demonstrating the mobility of his design in the late ’60s. The range of movement in this suit is superior to previous suits because it uses a special kind of toroidal joint.

Video promozionale della AiResearch che mostra Bill Elkins, il creatore, alle prese con la tuta spaziale EX-1A, modello apparso verso la fine degli anni ’60 e contraddistinto dalla grandissima capacità di movimenti grazie ai giunti toroidali al posto dei tradizionali. Questi giunti, che nient’altro erano che segmenti ciambellosi che univano le diverse articolazioni della tuta, permettevano movimenti fluidi e naturali anche su tute rigide come la EX-1A. Erano gli anni della disputa tra tute morbide e tute rigide e lo stesso Elkins si esprimeva così:

There are some advantages of the hard suit, although I did not remain a proponent of it. The hard suit had value for being able to go to much higher pressures. The higher you go, the less likely you are to have the bends when exiting a higher-pressure space vehicle. So if you were wearing [a hard suit], you could scramble to do an emergency [spacewalk] because you didn’t have to pre-breathe for four hours. It’s a very mobile little spaceship, if you will. Vic Vykukal, a NASA Ames engineer, also did pioneering work on the hard suit. The soft suit came from a line of pressure suits used by the Air Force and Navy. BF Goodrich’s soft suits for the Mercury project were evolved from a Navy pressure suit… It was a question of cultures and politics within the R&D labs. There was the West Coast technology such as Litton, and NASA’s Ames Research lab; but then the older timers from the East who knew soft suits. Ultimately, soft suits won out.

In approfondimento la foto completa della tuta EX-1A
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