Advanced Extra-vehicular Activity Pressure Garment Requirements Development

摘要

The NASA Johnson Space Center advanced pressure garment technology developmentteam is addressing requirements development for exploration missions. Lessons learnedfrom the Z-2 high fidelity prototype development have reiterated that clear low-levelrequirements and verification methods reduce risk to the government, improve efficiency inpressure garment design efforts, and enable the government to be a smart buyer. Theexpectation is to provide requirements at the specification level that are validated so thattheir impact on pressure garment design is understood. Additionally, the team will providedefined verification protocols for the requirements. However, in reviewing explorationspace suit high level requirements there are several gaps in the team’s ability to define andverify related lower level requirements. This paper addresses the efforts in requirementareas such as mobility/fit/comfort and environmental protection (dust, radiation, plasma,secondary impacts) to determine the method by which the requirements can be defined anduse of those methods for verification. Gaps exist at various stages. In some cases componentlevel work is underway, but no system level effort has begun; in other cases no effort hasbeen initiated to close the gap. Status of on-going efforts and potential approaches to opengaps are discussed.