What Is NASA’s Spacesuit-as-a-Service xEVAS Program?

The Ticking Clock on NASA’s Aging Spacesuits

A spacesuit is not clothing. It is a miniature, human-shaped spacecraft. It provides oxygen, removes carbon dioxide, maintains perfect pressure and temperature, and shields an astronaut from the vacuum, radiation, and micrometeoroids of space. For decades, the icon of this capability for NASA has been the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), the white, backpack-equipped suit synonymous with spacewalks outside the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS).

That icon is now a relic. The EMU was designed in the 1970s for the Space Shuttle program, with an intended design life of just 15 years. Today, astronauts are relying on a dwindling inventory of this hardware that is now over 50 years old, far exceeding its planned operational lifespan. This extended use has pushed the EMU fleet to a breaking point. Astronauts have openly remarked that the suits are not “spring chickens” and that the hardware is simply “wearing out.”

This isn’t just a maintenance headache; it’s an acute safety crisis. The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG), the agency’s internal watchdog, has issued multiple, increasingly urgent reports on the state of the EMU fleet. These audits paint a disturbing picture, documenting a cascade of systemic failures and risks. The OIG has repeatedly warned of “dangerous water intrusion” incidents, “carbon dioxide problems,” a persistent risk of decompression sickness, and failures in the suits’ thermal regulation systems.

The problems extend to the astronauts’ physical well-being. The suits’ decades-old ergonomic design has been linked to “shoulder and hand injuries,” and the OIG has noted that the EMUs fail to provide sufficient nutrition and hydration for long-duration spacewalks.

Compounding the safety issues is a severe inventory crisis. NASA originally manufactured 18 complete EMU suits. By 2017, OIG reports indicated that the number of fully functional, flight-ready units had dropped to just 11. Industry insiders believe the number available today is even lower. The suits currently in use are a patchwork of refurbished components, with some parts dating back to the 1980s.

This situation has trapped NASA in a systemic failure loop. The hardware’s advanced age means it requires constant, intensive maintenance. But the design is so old that parts are obsolete. It is no longer possible to build new EMUs; it would be cost-prohibitive, as the technology and manufacturing base from the 1970s no longer exists. This has forced NASA into a costly and failing battle against time, trying to keep geriatric hardware alive long after its intended retirement. This reality – that the agency’s primary tool for building and maintaining its presence in orbit was failing – meant a replacement wasn’t just desirable. It was an existential necessity.

A “High Visibility Close Call”: The 2013 Incident

The abstract warnings from auditors became a terrifying reality on July 16, 2013. European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA astronaut Christopher Cassidy began a routine spacewalk, designated EVA 23, outside the International Space Station.

Shortly after exiting the airlock, Parmitano reported feeling water on the back of his head. Mission Control initially suspected a leak from his in-suit drink bag. But the situation escalated rapidly. Within minutes, the water was not just a few drops; it was a steadily growing volume. The water began to fill his helmet, covering his ears and blurring his vision. As he headed back to the airlock, the water covered his nose and began to enter his mouth, making it difficult to breathe. He was effectively blinded and deafened, as the water blocked his communications cap. He was, in his own words, drowning in space.

Mission Control, recognizing the extreme danger, immediately terminated the spacewalk. Parmitano, relying on his training and memory, made his way back to the airlock, where his crewmates repressurized the chamber and pulled the helmet off his head. The subsequent Mishap Investigation Board (MIB) report stated that Parmitano’s calm demeanor in the face of a life-threatening situation possibly saved his life.

The investigation uncovered a chilling technical cause: inorganic materials had clogged the drum holes in the EMU’s water separator, a component of the life support backpack. This blockage caused water from the suit’s cooling system to spill into the ventilation loop, which then pumped it directly into his helmet.

Even more troubling, the MIB found that the same suit had leaked a week earlier during EVA 22. At the time, the team had dismissed the anomaly, misdiagnosing it as a simple leak from Parmitano’s drink bag. This revealed a “lack of knowledge regarding this particular failure mode” within NASA. The agency, after decades of operating the EMU, was operationally blind. The hardware was so old that it was beginning to fail in ways the engineering teams had never anticipated. The 2013 incident shattered the illusion of the EMU’s reliability and served as the primary, visceral justification for its replacement.

The Spacewalk That Wasn’t

If the 2013 incident exposed the EMU’s critical safety failures, a 2019 incident exposed its significant operational and design failures. In March 2019, NASA was poised to make history. Astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch were scheduled to conduct the first-ever all-female spacewalk, a milestone celebrated by the agency and the public.

Days before the event, NASA abruptly canceled the historic spacewalk. The reason: a spacesuit sizing issue.

The problem centered on a key component called the Hard Upper Torso (HUT), a rigid fiberglass shell that serves as the “shirt” of the spacesuit. The HUT is the primary structural component to which the helmet, arms, and lower torso attach. It is not easily adjustable and comes in a few fixed sizes.

Anne McClain had trained on Earth in both medium and large-sized HUTs. However, after completing her first spacewalk in orbit, she determined that the medium size was her best and safest fit. Her body, like that of most astronauts, had changed slightly in microgravity. Her spacewalk partner, Christina Koch, also required a medium-sized HUT.

This created a logistical impasse. While the station had two medium HUTs on board, only one of them could be configured, tested, and “made ready” in time for the scheduled spacewalk. Preparing a suit for an EVA is a complex, time-consuming process. Faced with this limitation, McClain made the decision herself to step aside, prioritizing the mission’s safety and timeline over the historic milestone. NASA astronaut Nick Hague, who fit the available large torso, took her place.

The incident was a public embarrassment for NASA, but it was the physical manifestation of a problem the OIG had already identified: the EMU’s “constrained Hard Upper Torso sizing.” The design, created in an era when the astronaut corps was almost exclusively male, physically “limits which astronauts can participate in extravehicular activities.” The EMU was simply not designed for the diverse body types of NASA’s modern astronaut classes, which are now 50 percent female.

The 2019 cancellation was the moment NASA’s hardware limitations visibly constrained its own mission planning and personnel selection. The spacesuit was no longer an enabler of exploration; it was a barrier. This incident established a core, non-negotiable requirement for whatever suit came next: it must be a spacesuit for everyone.

The Maintenance Quagmire

The third failure of the EMU system was not technical but bureaucratic and financial. The increasingly difficult and expensive job of maintaining the ancient EMU fleet is handled by a single contractor, Collins Aerospace, under the Extravehicular Activity Space Operations Contract (ESOC).

This contract is a staggering financial burden on the agency. Just to keep the 1970s-era suits functioning for the final years of the ISS, the ESOC contract was valued at $1.5 billion through 2027. This is the price of life support for a geriatric system.

Worse, the OIG has found that the performance on this contract is failing. In a scathing September 2025 report, the OIG documented a “decline” in Collins’s performance, highlighting “considerable schedule delays, cost overruns, and quality issues.” The report noted that Collins was “years behind schedule” in delivering critical life support components, forcing NASA to operate its limited suit inventory with no margin for error.

The audit detailed pervasive quality-control failures that endangered the program. In one instance, life support systems refurbished by Collins and sent to the ISS were found to have wrong-sized screws installed. This error, which could have had catastrophic consequences, was flagged by NASA. A month later, it reoccurred on another component.

This situation has left NASA in a bureaucratic checkmate. The OIG concluded that the agency has “limited leverage to incentivize improved performance.” Collins Aerospace is the sole provider for this highly specialized work; NASA has no alternative. The agency cannot simply fire its EMU maintenance contractor, as no other company on Earth has the expertise to service the obsolete hardware.

This dependency trap created an accelerating risk spiral. The older the suits get, the more maintenance they need. The more maintenance they need, the more the sole-source contractor struggles with delays and quality control. The more the contractor struggles, the higher the risk to the astronauts who must use the suits.

This inescapable maintenance quagmire, combined with the acute safety and sizing failures, made it clear that NASA’s only way out was to scrap the EMU entirely and start over. But its first attempt to do so would prove to be one of the agency’s most expensive and high-profile failures.

The Billion-Dollar False Start: NASA’s Struggle to Build Its Own Replacement

Long before the 2019 spacewalk cancellation, NASA management knew the EMU’s time was limited. In 2007, the agency embarked on an ambitious, 14-year quest to build its own next-generation spacesuit, a successor that would serve the agency for its return to the Moon and, eventually, missions to Mars.

This effort was not one focused program but a series of disjointed and poorly managed projects. It began with the Constellation Space Suit System, which cost $135.6 million before the Constellation program’s cancellation. It was followed by the Advanced Space Suit Project, which consumed another $51.6 million. Finally, these efforts were consolidated into the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Units (xEMU) project.

In 2017, the OIG audited these programs and found that despite spending nearly $200 million over the previous nine years, NASA was “years away from having a flight-ready spacesuit.” The programs were plagued by shifting requirements, unstable funding, and a lack of a clear mission.

The situation came to a head in August 2021. The OIG released a definitive report on the xEMU project. It found that NASA’s total spending on its in-house spacesuit development had ballooned to over a billion dollars.

The verdict was devastating. After 14 years of work and more than $1 billion invested, NASA had “no flight-ready spacesuits.” The OIG concluded with a stark warning: this failure, combined with competing schedule demands from the ISS, the Human Landing System (HLS) for the Moon, and the lunar Gateway, would “preclude a 2024 lunar landing.”

NASA’s own bureaucracy had spent a billion dollars and, in the process, had grounded its own flagship exploration program. The agency had proven it could no longer build a spacesuit. This high-profile programmatic collapse was the final straw, forcing NASA to abandon its 60-year-old development model and embrace a radical new commercial strategy.

The Technological Silver Lining

That billion-dollar investment was not a complete waste. While the xEMU project failed to deliver a flight-ready suit, it succeeded as a high-risk research and development program. The money produced the xEMU, a “design, verification, and test” (DVT) unit. This was the first new spacesuit architecture NASA had designed in 40 years, and it was a technological marvel.

The xEMU engineers had systematically solved the fundamental design flaws of the old EMU. The program successfully developed and tested several “game changing technologies” that would define the next generation of suits.

First was mobility. The xEMU was a rear-entry suit, featuring a hatch on the back of the hard torso that allowed an astronaut to “walk” into it. This, combined with advanced bearings and new soft-joint designs, targeted “more mobility and flexibility.” For the first time, a NASA suit was designed for walking, kneeling, and bending in a gravity environment, unlike the stiff EMU, which was only designed for floating.

Second was a regenerable life support system. The old EMU relied on “single use” lithium hydroxide (LiOH) canisters to scrub carbon dioxide from the astronaut’s breath. These canisters would become saturated after a few hours and had to be discarded, a major logistical burden. The xEMU featured the “Rapid Cycle Amine” (RCA) system, which used a solid amine sorbent. This system could absorb CO2 and then “regenerate” itself by simply venting the captured CO2 into the vacuum of space, making it endlessly reusable.

Third was a new cooling system. To prevent a repeat of the 2013 near-drowning, the xEMU featured the “Suit Water Membrane Evaporator” (SWME). This new thermal control system was designed to be more robust, more efficient, and not prone to the failure mode that plagued the old suit.

The xEMU itself would never fly. It was a prototype, a proof of concept. But in one of the most significant strategic pivots in its modern history, NASA decided to take all the data, all the test results, and all the “lessons-learned” from its billion-dollar xEMU research and give it to the private sector. The agency that had failed at project management had succeeded brilliantly at research, and it was now handing off its blueprints to commercial companies, hoping they could do what NASA could not: build the suit.

A New Strategy: The Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) Program

In 2022, in the immediate aftermath of the 2021 OIG report, NASA officially abandoned the traditional, government-owned hardware model that had defined the agency since its inception. It announced the new Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) program.

This program is not a traditional procurement. It’s a massive Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract, which functions as a master contract allowing NASA to place orders for services. It has a combined potential value of $3.5 billion.

The xEVAS program fundamentally redefines NASA’s relationship with the industry. It introduced a new “Spacesuit-as-a-Service” model.

• The Old Model (Apollo/Shuttle): NASA designed the hardware. It paid contractors like ILC Dover and Hamilton Standard to build components to its exact specifications. NASA owned the final suits and was responsible for all maintenance, logistics, and operations.
• The New Model (xEVAS): NASA is no longer an owner; it is a customer. The agency “purchases moonwalking services” from a commercial provider. Under this model, the companies are responsible for designing, building, qualifying, certifying, and owning the spacesuits. NASA’s role is to set the high-level technical and safety requirements and to give final approval for the systems.

The rationale for this pivot is multifaceted. The primary stated goal is to use NASA’s purchasing power to “build a robust economy at the Moon” and in low-Earth orbit. This strategy hinges on a powerful commercial incentive. Because the private companies own the intellectual property and the hardware, they are explicitly encouraged to sell their spacesuit services to other customers.

This new market could include private astronauts, commercial space stations (like Axiom’s own Axiom Station), and even foreign government space agencies. The idea is that this competition will foster innovation, drive down costs for NASA, and create a self-sustaining American industry that doesn’t rely on a single government contract.

This is not a new idea for NASA. It’s the same successful commercial service model the agency used for its Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew programs, which famously hired companies like SpaceX to develop vehicles to fly supplies and astronauts to the ISS, breaking a costly government monopoly. The xEVAS program is the application of that same philosophy to the last great piece of government-owned hardware: the spacesuit.

In June 2022, NASA announced it had selected two companies for the xEVAS contract, setting them up to compete head-to-head for “task orders” – specific contracts for specific missions. The two contenders were Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace.

Axiom Space and the First New Moonwalk in 50 Years

In September 2022, NASA awarded the first and most-anticipated task order under the xEVAS contract. The winner was Axiom Space.

The task order, with a base value of $228.5 million, is for the development, production, and support of the complete “moonwalking system” for the Artemis III mission. This is the historic mission, currently planned for 2026, that will land Americans – including the first woman and first person of color – on the lunar surface for the first time in over 50 years.

Axiom Space is now responsible for the full package. The company must design, build, and certify the suits and all their support equipment. When the Artemis III astronauts step onto the lunar south pole, they will be wearing and using commercially-owned and operated hardware. NASA, for the first time, will be a guest in its own “suit.”

The technological and philosophical leap from the old EMU to the new commercial suits is immense, representing a true generational shift.

Introducing the AxEMU

Axiom’s suit, the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), is the direct beneficiary of NASA’s billion-dollar “false start.” The company has explicitly stated that its suit “builds on NASA’s spacesuit prototype developments.” Axiom’s engineers took the xEMU’s data and are now focused on turning that research into a reliable, manufacturable, and operational product.

The design of the AxEMU is a direct response to the EMU’s well-documented failures.

• A Suit for Everyone: The suit’s primary design feature is its solution to the 2019 sizing crisis. It is built to be “a spacesuit for everyone.” Rather than fixed HUT sizes, the AxEMU features a modular and highly adjustable architecture, designed to accommodate a much wider range of human body types, from the 5th percentile female to the 95th percentile male. This will allow NASA to select crews based on skill and mission requirements, not on who happens to fit the available hardware.
• Mobility for the Moon: Unlike the EMU, which was optimized for floating in microgravity, the AxEMU is designed for a gravitational environment. Its “better mobility” comes from advanced, flexible joints in the hips, legs, and waist, building on the rear-entry xEMU design. This will allow astronauts to walk naturally, bend over to pick up rocks, kneel, and use geological tools – movements that were incredibly stiff and difficult in the old EMU and nearly impossible in the “bunny-hopping” Apollo suits.
• Built for the Lunar South Pole: The AxEMU is specifically designed to “meet the complex challenges of the lunar south pole.” This is a new and uniquely harsh environment. It requires “added protection from hazards at the Moon,” including the abrasive, electrostatically-charged lunar dust (regolith) that can destroy seals and mechanisms. It must also operate in the extreme cold of permanently shadowed regions.
• Modern Technology: The suit incorporates modern technology across the board, including a redesigned helmet and visor for a greater field of view, an integrated 4G/LTE-capable communications system, and advanced, reliable cooling and diagnostic systems designed to prevent a repeat of the 2013 water intrusion incident.

Unlikely Partners: Prada and Oakley

The most visible evidence of the new commercial model’s power is in Axiom’s list of “non-traditional” partners. By moving development outside of NASA’s traditional procurement system, Axiom has been free to leverage best-in-class expertise from industries far removed from aerospace.

In a move that raised eyebrows, Axiom announced a partnership with the Italian luxury fashion house Prada. Prada’s engineers are not simply adding a logo; they are actively working with Axiom to develop the materials and design for the suit’s outer layer. This thermal garment must be lightweight, flexible, and robust, providing insulation from the Moon’s extreme temperatures while protecting the suit’s inner layers from abrasive dust.

Similarly, Axiom partnered with Oakley, a world leader in high-performance optics, to engineer the AxEMU’s “Next-Gen Visor System.” The visor must protect astronauts from the unfiltered sun while providing perfect optical clarity. Axiom, by its own admission, is an expert in space systems, not optics. The commercial model allows them to partner with the world’s best, rather than trying to reinvent the technology in-house.

This new ecosystem also includes a partnership with Nokia, which is working to integrate high-speed “cellular network capabilities” into the suit, allowing for robust data and video transmission from the lunar surface. These partnerships are the xEVAS model working as intended – fusing the rigor of aerospace engineering with the rapid innovation and specialized expertise of the broader global market.

Testing a Personal Spaceship

Axiom’s AxEMU is now moving at high speed through a rigorous certification gauntlet. Under the xEVAS contract, the company is required to test the suit in a “spacelike environment” to prove its readiness for the Artemis III mission.

This testing is taking place in several key NASA facilities. The suit has undergone numerous crewed tests in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) in Houston. The NBL is one of the world’s largest indoor pools, holding 6.2 million gallons of water. It is used to simulate weightlessness for ISS spacewalks, but for the AxEMU, engineers can weight the suit precisely to simulate the Moon’s 1/6th gravity. In these underwater tests, astronauts and engineers in the AxEMU practice movements, test the life support, cooling, and communications systems, and refine procedures for working on the lunar surface.

The suit has also completed over 23 tests in NASA’s Active Response Gravity Offload System (ARGOS). This system is a sophisticated, intelligent overhead crane that attaches to the suit. It actively tracks the astronaut’s movements in real-time, offloading 5/6ths of their body and suit-weight, allowing them to walk and move in a high-fidelity simulated lunar gravity environment.

In addition to these simulations, the AxEMU has undergone “lunar regolith challenge testing” to prove its dust-mitigation features work, as well as field evaluations with the new generation of lunar geological tools.

The Other Contender: Collins’s Pivot and Sudden Exit

Axiom’s journey to the Moon is the “hero” narrative of the xEVAS program. But the story of the program’s other winner, Collins Aerospace, is a cautionary tale that reveals the deep risks still facing NASA.

In December 2022, a few months after Axiom won the Artemis contract, NASA awarded the second xEVAS task order to Collins Aerospace. This $97.2 million task order was for an equally important job: developing a new, next-generation spacesuit to replace the failing EMU fleet on the International Space Station.

The plan was for Collins, along with its partner ILC Dover (the original manufacturer of the legacy EMU), to design a new suit optimized for microgravity. Like Axiom’s, this suit was intended to be lighter, more efficient, require far less maintenance, and be designed to “fit the diverse astronaut corps size range,” solving the 2019 sizing problem for good. Collins was working toward a 2026 orbital demonstration of its new suit, which would finally allow NASA to retire the 50-year-old EMUs.

A Shock to the System

In June 2024, the entire xEVAS program was rocked by a major and unexpected announcement. NASA and Collins Aerospace had “mutually agreed” to “descope” the xEVAS task orders. In plain English, Collins was “backing out” of its $97.2 million contract to build the new ISS suit. The 2026 demonstration was canceled.

The official public reason was a carefully worded statement that “Collins recognized its development timeline would not support the space station’s schedule and NASA’s mission objectives.” Behind the scenes, reports indicated the program was in serious trouble. Insiders described the development as “bumpy,” “far behind schedule,” and having “spent too much money.” Facing an uphill battle, Collins decided to “cut their losses” and exit the contract.

This was the first high-profile failure of the Spacesuit-as-a-Service model. It proved that a vendor, even one as large and established as Collins, could fail to deliver, leaving NASA without a product.

The Lingering Risk and the Sole Survivor

Collins’s exit from the xEVAS competition does not, by itself, leave the ISS without a path forward. Axiom Space, in addition to its Artemis Moon suit, was also awarded a task order in July 2023 to develop its AxEMU for use in low-Earth orbit. With Collins out of the picture, Axiom Space is now the de facto sole provider for all of NASA’s next-generation spacesuit needs, for both the Moon and the ISS.

But the Collins exit creates a far more dangerous and complex problem. This is the central, unresolved risk at the heart of NASA’s spacesuit program.

Collins’s failure to build the new xEVAS suit does not end its relationship with NASA. Collins still holds the $1.5 billion ESOC contract to maintain the old, failing EMU suits. In its statement announcing the xEVAS exit, NASA confirmed this, noting that “Collins will continue to support NASA’s EMU” through the existing legacy contract.

This has created a “worst of all worlds” scenario for NASA.

1. The agency’s primary problem is its total reliance on the 50-year-old, dangerous EMU suits.
2. The OIG has already established that the sole-source contractor for maintaining these old suits, Collins Aerospace, is doing a poor job, with major delays and quality-control failures.
3. NASA’s escape plan was the xEVAS program, which would replace the old EMUs with a new suit. It awarded this replacement contract to… Collins Aerospace.
4. Collins then failed to deliver on this new xEVAS contract, backing out in 2024.

By failing to build the new suit, Collins has now forced NASA to depend on its failing old suit maintenance for even longer. The agency’s escape plan failed, and the failure has locked them back in the room with the original crisis.

This situation makes Axiom Space’s ISS suit development the only viable path for NASA to escape this dangerous dependency trap. The pressure on Axiom to deliver its low-Earth orbit suit quickly and successfully is now immense. The company, which began as one of two competitors, has effectively become a sole-source provider for the entire future of American spacewalking, both on the Moon and in Earth orbit.

The New Space Race: A Commercial Market for Spacesuits

The ultimate goal of the xEVAS program was not just to buy suits for NASA. It was to use NASA’s money as venture capital to seed an entire commercial market. By that metric, the program is already a success.

Axiom Space is the blueprint for this new model. Axiom is not just a NASA contractor; it’s a commercial space company building the world’s first commercial space station, Axiom Station, which will one day detach from the ISS and fly independently.

The AxEMU is a product, not a project. Because Axiom owns the suit, it has a dual-use business model. The company will use the same suits it provides to NASA to support its own private astronaut missions and commercial customers on its own space station. The suit is, as Axiom states, “designed for every mission.” NASA is simply the first and most important anchor tenant.

This new commercial-first strategy is validated by explosive market forecasts. The global spacesuit market, valued at a modest $150.5 million in 2022, is projected to skyrocket to $1.57 billion by 2030. This reflects a staggering 34.13% compound annual growth rate.

This growth is being driven by the very ecosystem NASA intended to create. Commercial operators are the fastest-growing end-user segment. New players like SpaceX are developing their own EVA suits for private missions. And other nations are investing heavily, with the Asia-Pacific region showing rapid growth.

NASA’s $3.5 billion xEVAS program has successfully redefined the spacesuit. It is no longer a piece of bespoke, priceless, government-owned hardware. It is a scalable, manufacturable, and financeable commercial product. This is the economic flywheel NASA was betting on.

Summary

NASA’s legacy Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuit, a marvel of 1970s engineering, became a dangerous and unsupportable relic. Its systemic failures were not abstract; they were demonstrated by the terrifying 2013 near-drowning of astronaut Luca Parmitano and the high-profile 2019 operational failure that prevented the first all-female spacewalk. The suit’s safety flaws and design limitations, rooted in a bygone era, had begun to actively constrain the agency’s missions.

The agency’s first attempt to fix the problem, a 14-year, billion-dollar in-house program to build the xEMU, failed to deliver a single flight-ready suit. This programmatic collapse provided the core technological research that would enable the next step.

That failure forced NASA into a radical strategic pivot: the “Spacesuit-as-a-Service” xEVAS model. This $3.5 billion program turned NASA from an owner of hardware into a customer for services, inviting private companies to design, build, and own the next generation of suits.

This bet has created a new commercial industry. Axiom Space, building on NASA’s billion-dollar research and infusing it with innovation from “non-traditional” partners like Prada and Oakley, is now on a clear path to provide the AxEMU suit for the Artemis III lunar landing.

But the program’s first major stumble – the high-profile 2024 exit of Collins Aerospace from the ISS suit contract – is a stark reminder of the risks of this new service model. It has also exposed a critical, unresolved threat: NASA’s continued, inescapable reliance on that same contractor to maintain its ancient, failing suits. The future of American spacewalking, on the Moon and in Earth orbit, now rests entirely on the success of this new, fragile, and dynamic commercial partnership.