A dress worth tens of millions;
People's understanding of clothing is often limited to its characteristics of covering, keeping warm, beautiful and generous, but when people enter space, they will find that the role of space suits has already exceeded the traditional scope. Because of the pressure environment close to vacuum, extreme temperature environment, lack of oxygen needed for life, space dust, space debris and the threat of space radiation. Space suits are needed to provide a good protection and guarantee system for astronauts' life and work in space.
Space suits can be divided into in-cabin space suits and extravehicular space suits according to their functions. In-cabin spacesuit is used in the case of leakage and sudden pressure drop in spacecraft cabin. When the astronauts put it on in time and connect the oxygen and gas supply system in the cabin, the clothing will immediately pressurize and supply gas, and can provide certain temperature protection and communication functions to ensure that the astronauts can return safely when the spacecraft fails. Extravehicular spacesuit is more complicated. It is the guarantee and support system for astronauts to leave the cabin and enter the open space. It not only needs independent life support and working ability, including extreme thermal environment protection and human body balance control, oxygen supply and pressure control, indoor microenvironment ventilation and purification, measurement and control and communication system, power supply system and astronaut visual protection and support, but also needs joint system with good activity and emergency oxygen supply system in case of major system failure. The extravehicular spacesuit is structurally composed of micro-flow protective layer (outer cover), vacuum heat insulation shielding layer, airtight limiting layer, ventilation structure and liquid cooling suit, just like an independent life support system. The extravehicular spacesuit system is usually much heavier than the strong man. Its price is naturally high. At present, it costs tens of millions of dollars to develop and produce an extravehicular spacesuit.
When it comes to space suits, we can't help but talk about "space jet packs". This backpack is about 1.25m high and 830mm wide, with a total weight of 150kg. It contains 12 kg of liquid nitrogen and has 24 nozzles. It is like a chair without a seat, which is installed on the astronaut's back. Astronauts can control 24 micro nozzles to spray compressed nitrogen from the backpack through the switch on the armrest, thus forming different reverse thrust in all directions and realizing the movement in different directions. With this kind of jetpack, astronauts can freely somersault, rotate, move up and down and back and forth in the vast space.
Because space is in a vacuum, without the protection of the atmosphere, the temperature changes greatly. The temperature can be higher than 100℃ in sunshine and lower than -200℃ in no sunshine. At the same time, there are all kinds of radiation and meteors that can cause harm to human body. Therefore, when you walk in space, you must wear a special spacesuit. At the same time, because the artificial air pressure and air composition in the closed cabin of manned spacecraft such as spacecraft, space station and space shuttle are basically the same as those on the ground, the human body absorbs a certain amount of nitrogen, while the air pressure in the space suit is low, only 27.5% of the atmospheric pressure. If astronauts suddenly leave the cabin, the blood supply will be poor after encountering low pressure, and nitrogen dissolved in adipose tissue cannot be carried to the lungs through blood to form bubbles, which may cause air embolism and blockage of blood vessels. Therefore, astronauts need to suck pure oxygen to expel nitrogen from the body before leaving the cabin to avoid hidden dangers.
When spacewalking astronauts fly around the earth at high speed, there is no reference object in the vast space, so it is impossible to distinguish the distance and speed of the object. Without insurance measures, they may get lost in the vast space and become human satellites. Coupled with manned spacecraft and their own movements, astronauts sometimes get confused and may be in danger, so spacewalking needs to take insurance measures-wearing seat belts. Seat belts are like a baby's umbilical cord, connecting astronauts with spacecraft and preventing astronauts from getting lost in space. 1On February 7th, 984, during the flight of the American space shuttle Challenger 1 1, astronaut Bruce McKandri walked freely in space for the first time without wearing a seat belt for 95 minutes, and captured the satellite "The Year of the Sun Peak" that had stopped working. Bruce completed the first satellite capture mission of the space shuttle. This spacewalk also created a new world for human space activities. But for the sake of safety, astronauts still need to wear seat belts. In case the astronaut can't walk back to the space shuttle by himself, he can be pulled back with a towing cable.