WASHINGTON — New spacesuits for Artemis lunar missions and the International Space Station may not be ready until after the end of the decade, a report by NASA’s inspector general warns.
In an April 20 report, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) concluded that the agency erred when it used a commercial services approach to develop new ISS and lunar spacesuits through its Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, program.
“NASA’s acquisition strategy for xEVAS — using a firm-fixed-price, service-based contract approach — was not well suited to the next-generation spacesuit design and development effort,” the OIG report states, citing the technical risks of developing spacesuits and a lack of industry experience in doing so, as well as non-NASA markets that have yet to emerge.
NASA selected Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace in 2022 for xEVAS, using a commercial model the agency has also used on the commercial cargo and crew programs. NASA later awarded task orders to Axiom to develop a lunar spacesuit and to Collins for an ISS spacesuit.
However, NASA and Collins agreed in 2024 to effectively end that company’s participation in the xEVAS program, eliminating the competitive aspects of the program. Axiom is continuing development of its lunar spacesuit, a version of which could be used for the ISS or future commercial space stations.
NASA selected Collins despite poor performance by the company in its work maintaining the current, decades-old suits used on the ISS. That included a 2023 letter that NASA program managers sent to senior leadership at Collins “outlining pervasive management and performance issues over the previous several years,” the report stated. Collins, though, received an “Excellent” rating in past performance during NASA’s evaluation of its xEVAS proposal.
Although Collins had a different management team on xEVAS, NASA said the company started having performance issues on the contract less than a year after the award, failing to meet milestone requirements. NASA and Collins agreed to descope the contract shortly after Collins completed a preliminary design review on its suit, one year late.
Axiom is continuing work on its suit, but the OIG report warned that it may be years late, based on average development times for other recent spaceflight programs, including commercial cargo and crew, Orion and the Space Launch System. Those programs averaged 8.7 years from contract award to first test flight.
“NASA’s original schedules to demonstrate the lunar and microgravity spacesuits in 2025 and 2026, respectively, were overly optimistic and ultimately proved unachievable, as evidenced by delays of at least a year and a half for both spacesuits,” the OIG argued in the report.
“Even with efforts to accelerate the schedule, there is little to no schedule margin for the spacesuits to be ready for the Artemis lunar landing mission and a diminishing amount of margin before the ISS’s decommissioning,” the report stated. “If Axiom experiences design and testing delays in line with this historical average, the lunar and microgravity spacesuit demonstrations would not occur until 2031.”
The OIG added it is not making an explicit prediction that Axiom’s suit will not be ready until 2031 but only offering “a more realistic development timeline compared to those initially agreed upon.”
The report’s concerns about further spacesuit development delays clashed with the confidence that both NASA and Axiom have expressed recently about work on the Artemis lunar spacesuit, including plans for an in-space demonstration next year on the ISS or during the Artemis 3 mission, which will test either or both of the Human Landing System (HLS) landers in low Earth orbit.
“The agency has made it clear we’re going to fly a suit next year,” said Jonathan Cirtain, president and chief executive of Axiom Space, at an April 13 briefing during the 41st Space Symposium. “One way or another, whether it’s to ISS or on HLS, we’re going to test the suit next year.”
In an April 6 letter included in the OIG report, Lori Glaze, NASA’s acting associate administrator for exploration systems development, cited progress by Axiom “to deliver a safe, capable lunar spacesuit,” including testing of spacesuit technologies at NASA facilities.
“This progress underscores continued confidence that the spacesuit development effort is advancing as planned and remains aligned with the schedule required to support the lunar surface mission by 2028,” she wrote.
The report stated that NASA has increased its support to Axiom, including access to NASA testing facilities and subject matter expert (SME) personnel, something the agency’s administrator also stated.
“NASA is not taking a passive role in any component of America’s return to the lunar surface and building a Moon base,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a social media post April 20. “We are reviewing where NASA can do better, how we can provide relief where appropriate to burdensome requirements, where we can expand capabilities over time (Apollo 11’s EVA profile was very different than Apollo 17), and where we can help industry by inserting NASA SMEs and driving the intended outcomes.”
“I am confident that when NASA is ready to land on the Moon in 2028, our astronauts will be wearing Axiom suits,” he stated.