MILAN – Axiom Space presented the flight design of the Artemis spacesuit that the company is developing for NASA with the support of Prada.

At a briefing at the International Astronautical Congress on Oct. 16, Axiom and Prada revealed details about the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) suit that Axiom is developing for use by NASA on lunar landing missions beginning with Artemis 3.

“Today marks a significant step toward returning humans to the lunar surface,” Russell Ralston, executive vice president of extravehicular activities at Axiom, said at the briefing.

The company has already shown versions of the suit, including at a March 2023 event in Houston. However, those previous events used a suit with a dark top layer, which Axiom said was not designed for use on an actual space flight but was intended to protect proprietary elements of the suit design. This version has a white outer layer that would be used on Artemis missions.

Axiom highlighted the suit's advanced capabilities, particularly when compared to the suits worn by the Apollo astronauts on moonwalks more than half a century ago. “Certainly this suit design offers a lot more mobility,” he said. There is also greater redundancy in the suit, as well as healthy monitoring systems not available in the Apollo-era suits.

The design has also changed compared to previous versions of Axiom. “Over the last two years we’ve really revised the design pretty quickly,” he said. “What’s underneath that layer is not the same as it was a few years ago.”

The unveiling comes just over a year after Axiom announced it was collaborating with luxury goods company Prada, an unconventional partnership aimed at leveraging Prada's expertise in materials and design.

“Partnering with Prada has allowed us to make a lot of really big progress very quickly,” Ralston said in an interview.

He said Axiom used Prada's expertise in fabrics and clothing design to help develop the suit's outer layer, which reflects sunlight and prevents dust from entering the inner layers. “When our teams came together to design the suit, we learned from each other how to pattern the outer layer of the suit, how to sew, or how to tailor such bespoke fabrics.”

This capability is important because, he said, there is limited expertise in spacesuit development.

“When you look at all the different technologies that are needed within the suit, the uniqueness of those technologies and how they are applied, the supply chain tends to be quite unstable,” he said. “One of the things that Prada has really helped us with is the stability of that base, especially on the fabric side.”

“It was extremely important for Axiom to have a supplier that was able to respond to its needs very quickly and easily,” Prada Group Chief Marketing Officer Lorenzo Bertelli said in an interview. “This is obviously something that luxury and fashion design has because the scale is completely different.”

Not surprisingly, Prada also contributed to the suit's appearance. “One of the things that was important to us was the appeal of the suit, the look of the suit,” Ralston said. “Something Prada brought added to the overall aesthetic of the suit.”

One design aspect that brought the two companies together was a distinctive red stripe on the suit. Ralston noted that this is a nod to a NASA tradition where the mission commander's suit would have this red stripe to distinguish him from other spacewalkers. This red stripe is also a trademark of Prada design.

Bertelli added that Prada supported a team called Luna Rossa, or Red Moon, in the America's Cup yachting competition. “It’s a wonderful coincidence that these two things came together after more than 20 years.”

While Axiom referred to this version of the suit as a “flight design,” the company is still going through a critical design process for the suit, which officially freezes the design for production. “We're at a point where we have a design that we think is the right answer, so to speak,” Ralston said. “But what you have to do is qualify it, and that will be a process of really intensive testing.”

This development, he added, remains on schedule to have spacesuits ready for the Artemis 3 lunar landing mission, which NASA has already planned for fall 2026.

While the suit's current focus is on lunar walks, Ralston said the suit could easily be adapted for low-Earth orbit applications, such as spacewalks from the International Space Station or Axiom's future commercial space station. NASA had previously contracted with Collins Aerospace to develop a new ISS spacesuit, but Collins announced in June that it was halting work on that project.

“We have a single suit architecture, basically a single design,” he said. “All we need to do to go from an Artemis mission, for example, to a low Earth orbit mission is change boots.”

Both Bertelli and Ralston said the two companies worked well together. “One of the things that was required to move forward so quickly was to collaborate with others who may be more advanced in certain areas than the space industry, and to work together so as not to have to reinvent the wheel,” Ralston said.

Bertelli added that at Prada he had no problem finding people willing to work on the spacesuit, with about 30 employees working on it part-time or full-time. “I had a line of people wanting to work on this project. It was something extraordinary for her.”

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