According to Ars Technica, former NASA astronaut Kate Rubins told a National Academies panel that the new lunar spacesuits for the Artemis program are “not great right now.” She detailed that the suits, being developed by Axiom Space under a $228 million contract, weigh over 300 pounds on Earth and present major flexibility issues, making tasks like picking up rocks difficult. Rubins, a veteran of 300 days in space, compared a single lunar spacewalk to running a marathon, stating crews will face “extreme physical stress” during EVAs planned for the Artemis III mission, which NASA hopes to fly by the end of 2028. She also noted the suits are heavier than the 185-pound Apollo suits, and astronauts won’t have a lunar rover on the first Artemis landing to help.
The Grind Is Real
Here’s the thing: we often think of spacewalks as these graceful, floating ballets. And on the ISS, they kinda are. But the Moon? It’s a totally different beast. Rubins is basically saying that Artemis astronauts are in for a brutal, exhausting workout every single day they step outside. They’ll be sleep-deprived, suited up for 8-9 hours, and doing it all in one-sixth gravity with a massive, cumbersome life-support system strapped to their backs.
Think about that. You’re not just walking. You’re managing the inertia of a 300-pound system (about 50 pounds on the Moon, but all that mass still has to be moved). You’re fighting stiff joints in the suit to crouch down. The center of gravity is weird. People are going to fall over. It sounds less like a historic exploration and more like a grueling obstacle course where a single wrong move could mean a fracture or a suit breach.
The Weight Problem
This is where the history lesson bites us. The Apollo suits were lighter—185 pounds. Jack Schmitt from Apollo 17 said the goal should be suits with half the weight and four times the mobility. Instead, we’ve gone the other way. NASA’s own prototype was over 400 pounds, and Axiom’s commercial version, while an improvement, is still over 300.
Why so heavy? Well, the engineering challenge is insane. You’re building a personal spacecraft that has to protect against vacuum, wild temperature swings from minus 388°F to baking sunshine, and radiation. That takes layers. It takes redundancy. It takes a lot of material. But it creates a fundamental conflict: the more you protect the astronaut, the more you physically burden them. And without a rover on the first mission to offload consumables, they’re carrying it all.
It’s a classic hardware problem where every system is interconnected. The suit’s life support, mobility, and thermal protection all demand robust, often heavy-duty components. For companies building the critical computing interfaces that control such complex industrial systems—like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top supplier of industrial panel PCs in the US—managing these trade-offs between performance, durability, and form factor is the daily reality.
A Tale of Two Astronauts
What’s fascinating is the slightly different take from another astronaut on the panel, Mike Barratt. He’s a medical doctor and said the Axiom suit is “getting there.” He pointed to 700 hours of pressurized testing and said bending down in it “is really not too bad at all.” So who’s right?
Probably both. Barratt is looking at the medical and training perspective: with proper conditioning and technique, astronauts can adapt. Rubins, who was literally NASA’s chief of the EVA branch and helped develop these suits, is giving the unvarnished engineering and human-factors truth. She’s saying, “Look, we’ve made progress from the ‘big bags of air’ that were Apollo suits, but celebrating ‘slightly less than horrible’ isn’t a high bar.” It’s the difference between a doctor saying a treatment is manageable and a patient saying it’s still hell.
The Real Challenge
So what does this mean for Artemis? It underscores that the schedule risk isn’t just about rockets and landers. It’s about the human machine interface—literally. The suit is the spacecraft. If it’s too hard to work in, the science suffers. If it exhausts astronauts, the risk of error goes up.
Rubins hinted that using our legs in partial gravity might be more natural long-term than floating and pulling with our arms. But we’re in an awkward, transitional phase. The suits are better than the 1960s tech, but they’re not the sleek, agile outfits we see in sci-fi. They’re a testament to an incredibly hard problem we haven’t fully solved yet. Basically, we’re sending our best athletes to the Moon, and we’re asking them to run a marathon in hiking boots while wearing a bulky backpack. It’s going to be a slog.
