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The Real Martian Spinoffs Part 2: Time to Explore

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. – President John F. Kennedy, Rice University, Sept. 12, 1962

When President Kennedy challenged the United States to go to the moon, it was not solely a conquest of technology and scientific wealth; it was an adventure. This adventure, engineers discovered, would require the astronauts to go outside the spacecraft. Scientists saw significant value of the astronauts performing these extravehicular activities (EVAs) — spacewalks as they commonly are known — as a way of collecting data and samples, such as rocks from the moon. Outside the spacecraft, the astronauts were on the adventure of a lifetime. When NASA astronaut Ed White II, the first American spacewalker, was called back into the spacecraft by the Mission Control team, he said, “It’s the saddest moment of my life.”

Exploration in space, whether in orbit like White’s spacewalk or on Mars like the fictional mission portrayed in the film “The Martian,” is not as easy as hiking a new trail on Earth or riding your bike down the street. It requires a lot of resources, including those discussed in the first part of this series. This second part will discuss spinoff products from two other vital technology areas required for human planetary exploration in real life or on the big screen: rovers and spacesuits.

Rovers

In order to survive, Mark Watney, the stranded member of a fictional Mars expedition, must use his short-range rovers to travel thousands of miles across the Martian terrain. To complete the journey, Watney must retrofit the rovers and pack them with supplies, all while preserving a living space comfortable enough to occupy for weeks on end.

Cricket Trailers
Informed by the “nonstandard expertise in people in small spaces” that founder Garrett Finney acquired at NASA, Cricket’s trailers are designed as the ideal tools for exploring and reconnecting with our home planet. The Cricket trailer, Finney says, is “part of what a 21st century campground should be, and how it can be educational and sustainable.” Credits: Cricket

The constraints of provisioning an exploration vehicle while still giving astronauts a semblance of home is not purely science fiction. In fact, it is something NASA has been studying for decades. At this very second, orbiting about 250 miles above Earth’s surface are six people, including American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, the two crew members who are more than halfway through a yearlong stay aboard the International Space Station. The comforts of home are most certainly important to them.

In 1999, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, hired Garrett Finney, an award-winning architect, to help determine the best arrangement of equipment and necessities aboard the proposed Habitation Module for the space station. The Habitation Module was to be the living quarters for the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the orbiting outpost. Finney focused on “trying to remove irritation from astronauts’ lives” without interfering with mission operations.

Finney’s experience in dealing with space-premium areas led him to develop the Houston-based trailer company, Cricket. The towable trailers feature a wide number of options, including showers, toilets and beds, in a compact yet comfortable space. As on the space station, Cricket trailers’ walls and ceilings are used as functional surfaces. Like the Space Launch System, NASA’s newest rocket currently under development that will take astronauts deeper into space than ever before, the trailers are designed to be capable of exploring near and far, from short-duration trips to long expeditions. In addition, Finney designed the trailers to be light enough to be towed by a four-cylinder car.

Spacesuits

Ministry of Supply Shirt
The Apollo dress shirt from Ministry of Supply incorporates NASA-derived PCMs (phase change materials), which absorb and release heat depending on temperature, to keep the wearer comfortable.
For more information about this technology, visit: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2013/cg_5.html Credits: Ministry of Supply

In “The Martian,” Mark Watney has no shot at surviving on the Red Planet without the use of spacesuits to perform spacewalks. In low-Earth orbit, International Space Station crew members also don specialized suits and venture beyond the safety of their habitat to work on their outpost.

One important job of a spacesuit is temperature regulation, especially around the hands, which spacewalking astronauts often had difficulty keeping warm. In the early 1990s, engineers and scientists at Johnson, along with industry partners, developed and investigated phase change materials (PCMs) for possible use in spacesuit gloves. Simply put, PCMs absorb and release heat at designated temperatures to regulate temperature.

Discovering Johnson’s work on PCMs, Gihan Amarasiriwardena and Kevin Rustagi, at the time students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, saw an opportunity and formed the Ministry of Supply apparel company in Boston. Both students had long been interested in creating professional clothing that behaved like performance wear, capable of handling changing temperatures and activity levels throughout a day. PCMs proved to be the key. Infrared imagery tells the innovators where the most heat is released from the body, which helps them more effectively design their clothing, part of which is knit by robots. In addition to the temperature-regulating materials, the company uses strain analysis to understand how their material stretches, thus improving design and construction of their clothing.

In his speech at Rice University, President Kennedy called the exploration of space “one of the greatest adventures of all time.” For over 50 years, humans have explored and worked outside the spacecraft using both spacesuits and the Lunar Roving Vehicle. Today, humanity is preparing to go farther than ever before as we set off on the journey to Mars. The technologies and products developed to help astronauts in the harsh conditions generate spinoffs that improve the quality and comfort of life for humans on Earth.

For more information about spinoff technologies, visit:

http://spinoff.nasa.gov/

For more information about NASA’s Technology Transfer Program, visit:

http://technology.nasa.gov/

For more information about new NASA technology development, visit:

https://techport.nasa.gov/home