Nasa tests new spacesuits ready for return to Moon

Nasa is experimenting with a new, more flexible generation of space suits in anticipation of a new mission to the Moon by the year 2020 – and it is doing it in the same dusty crater in the Arizona desert where the original Apollo astronauts prepared themselves for their first experience of solid ground in outer space.

Anyone who has seen Neil Armstrong make his first moonwalk – or indeed, anyone familiar with Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story movies – knows that the first generation of spacesuits were unwieldy affairs, unable to allow the astronauts to make much more than "one small step".

In the space shuttle era, the suits have in fact hardened, making them better insulated but also uncomfortably rigid for anything other than floating in space. The new generation being prepared for the new Moon mission – codename Constellation – has much better articulation in the hips, knees and elbows.

Nasa, taking the lead from President Bush, is making plans not only to return to the Moon for the first time since 1972 but to set up a self-sustaining colony there and use it as a launchpad for further exploration of the solar system, including the first manned mission to Mars.

The year 2020 may sound like a long way off – and, given the vagaries of American politics, far from a done deal now that President Bush is about to leave office and Nasa fights off one piece of bad publicity after another. But Nasa's engineers are already busy planning and developing a new generation of suits, lunar vehicles and robots.

Some of their work was on display during Nasa's just-completed annual training exercise at Cinder Lake, Arizona. It is a barren, volcanic basin in north-eastern Arizona not entirely unlike a crater on the Moon which the agency first identified as a promising proving-ground for space training in the early 1960s.

At Cinder Lake, test astronauts could carry out the tasks their mission counterparts will be expected to complete on a new lunar mission – collecting soil samples, pushing a drill into the ground, or setting up satellite dishes – while wearing the experimental suits.

Neil Armstrong and his colleagues would have toppled over or torn the fabric inside their suits had they attempted many of those kinds of activities on the first Apollo missions.

One gadget tested at Cinder Lake was an "air shower" designed to blow lunar dust off the astronauts' suits before they return to their space craft. Another was a rear-entry design suit, allowing astronauts to walk directly into their suits and then out on to the Moon's surface once it was closed up behind them.

"The Constellation programme has very aggressive requirements and a lot of new challenges the Apollo programme never faced," spacesuit engineer Amy Ross told the Chicago Tribune during the exercise. "Things like the duration of the mission and the activities that are expected to be performed – those are new, so we need to develop entirely new systems."

The features tested at Cinder Lake were largely experimental, as was a rover vehicle that resembled nothing so much as a dune buggy with computers, cameras and solar panels attached. The idea is to extend the range of these vehicles from about six miles – the limit during the Apollo era – to at least 120 miles. "If we test here and it works out, then we feed that up the chain," said Barbara Romig, a project engineer from Johnson Space Centre in Houston. "Those results can be incorporated into our designs. If it does not work out well, we pass that up the chain as well. It becomes a lesson learned."