History
Upon receiving the contract to build the EMU in 1974, Hamilton United and ILC Dover delivered the first EMU units to NASA in 1982. During the research and development phase (1975–1980), a suit being tested caught fire, injuring a technician and forcing a redesign on the regulator and circulation fan. On STS-4 in July 1982, the astronauts practiced donning and doffing the suit in the Shuttle's airlock. The first Shuttle EVA was to occur on STS-5, but an electrical failure on the circulation fan forced the EVA to be cancelled. The first EVA of the new EMU finally occurred on STS-6 when Story Musgrave and Donald Peterson went out in the payload bay of the Space Shuttle Challenger and tested techniques to lower the launch cradle of a solid-fuel upper stage used to boost a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-A) into a geo-stationary orbit.
Other EVAs followed on the Shuttle, notably those on STS-41-B (the first Manned Maneuvering Unit flight), STS-41-C (the Solar Max repair mission), and STS-51-A (where two stranded satellites were retrieved and returned to Earth), but the majority of EMU uses occurred on the servicing missions of the Hubble Space Telescope. For those flights, two sets of EVA astronauts would venture out of the orbiter, thus requiring NASA to fly four sets of suits (along with repair parts). 41 EVAs using EMUs had been conducted out of the Space Shuttle airlock prior to the start of ISS assembly in November 1998.
With the building of the ISS, Hamilton Sundstrand and ILC Dover refined the existing Shuttle EMU by making the suit modular. This allowed the EMU to be left on the ISS for up to 2 years and resized on-orbit to fit various crew members. They also made provisions for increased battery capacity, the Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue (SAFER), improved cameras and radios, and a new caution and warning system. Another feature incorporated into the ISS suits included an additional battery to power heaters built into the glove, allowing astronauts to keep their hands warm during nighttime passages on each 95-minute orbit.
Currently, the ISS EMU and the Russian ORLAN are used by crews of all nationalities on the International Space Station. The two EMUs are stored within the Quest Joint Airlock.
Read more about this topic: Extravehicular Mobility Unit
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—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)