Future Use and Proposed Replacement
NASA continues to use the EMU in the wake of the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. When preparing for the Constellation Program, a now-cancelled series of missions to the ISS, Moon, and Mars which was planned to commence in 2015, NASA planned to replace the EMU and the ACES pressure suit with a new Constellation Space Suit system, derived from the ACES suit and the ILC Dover-developed Mark III and I-Suit space suit systems.
The new suit would have been designed, depending upon the configuration, to protect the astronaut during launch, in-flight emergencies, reentry and landing, and both microgravity and lunar EVAs. It was planned to feature common hardware and the modular features used in the ACES and EMU suits.
On June 11, 2008, NASA awarded a contract for Oceaneering International for the development and manufacturing of the new suits, with the David Clark Company and United Space Alliance being two of seven contractors in the new endeavor. Oceaneering beat out the Hamilton Sundstrand/ILC Dover partnership in the manufacturing of the new space suit.
However, on August 15, 2008 NASA press release stated that a compliance issue required the termination of Oceaneering's contract for the Constellation suit for the convenience of the government. Later, NASA announced that effective March 2, 2009 "NASA has awarded an interim letter contract to Oceaneering International Inc. of Houston to begin work on the design, development and production of a new spacesuit system for the Constellation Program. The new contract featured a Hamilton Sundstrand/ILC Dover partnership. The cancellation of the Constellation Program in 2010 leaves the suit's current status uncertain.
Read more about this topic: Extravehicular Mobility Unit
Famous quotes containing the words future, proposed and/or replacement:
“Today democracy, liberty, and equality are words to fool the people. No nation can progress with such ideas. They stand in the way of action. Therefore we frankly abolish them. In the future each man will serve the interest of the state with absolute obedience. Let him who refuses beware.”
—Charlie Chaplin (18891977)
“He [Roosevelt] has made some speeches that indicate that he is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House, and has proposed a program which is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Constitution.”
—William Howard Taft (18571930)
“Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)