Space Suits: The Next Generation

Continued from page 1

By David Chandler

Monday, December 18, 2006

But the company intends more than just emergency protection. Since the new flights are aimed at the general public, Orbital hopes to design suits with a "wow" factor that could woo a secondary market for space apparel: people who won't even use them in space. Toward that end, the company hired Chris Gilman, a designer whose primary experience has been designing very realistic space suits for Hollywood movies and television programs.

The team's first design, a suit called IS3 (for Industrial Suborbital Space Suit), was created to give "life-support functions for 30 minutes or longer at 500,000 feet, superior visibility of the user, and maximum mobility," Gilman says. "They are comfortable to wear, while looking very cool."

Tumlinson says the suits are made up of separate components and that "we are going to offer our customers the chance to buy the outer layers of their suits as souvenirs." His company will later produce spin-off apparel based on the new designs. While the inner pressure shell of the suits will be a standard design, the outer shell will have custom colors and designs for each of the space-tourism companies, he says.

The business may be just the beginning of a wave of companies hoping to take advantage of the emerging new industry. The idea is to provide a variety of products and services to support the hundreds of annual tourist flights from as many as a half-dozen new commercial spaceports--in Texas, California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Florida, and Nova Scotia--that are expected to begin in the next few years. Besides Virgin Galactic--founded by Virgin Atlantic chairman Richard Branson and X Prize winner Burt Rutan, designer of SpaceShipOne--the new companies include Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos; Armadillo Aerospace, founded by video-game designer John Carmack; and SpaceX, headed by PayPal founder Elon Musk. A market study by Bethesda, MD, consulting firm Futron projected that within 15 years there could be 15,000 annual suborbital tourist flights and 60 orbital flights, generating $1 billion in revenue.

"This is a new era, starting right now, in space," says Tumlinson, whose company's motto, derived from the title of a Robert A. Heinlein science-fiction novel, is "Have space suit, will travel." Orbital's first space suits will be delivered to XCor next year.