Following my recent Sciency Words post on “bunny hopping,” I got a lot of questions about NASA’s new spacesuit design. I wasn’t really able to answer those questions, so today I’d like to share a video from someone who’s a little better qualified to talk about this stuff.
Scott Manly is an astrophysicist and YouTuber. On his channel, he plays a lot of space-themed video games and talks about scientific accuracies (or inaccuracies) in said video games. I started watching Mr. Manly back when I was obsessed with Kerbal Space Program.
I think the big takeaway from this video is that NASA’s new spacesuit is not quite finished yet. It’s still a work in progress. That might explain some of the confusion over what the new spacesuit is supposed to do for astronauts once they’re on the Moon.
One thing I’m still wondering about: the new space boots. Several articles I looked at (like this one) describe the new boots as “hiking-style boots with flexible soles.” That doesn’t really satisfy my curiosity about these boots, so I’ll have to do more research on that.
Planet Pailly 
I was going to say something skeptical as I watched the engineer creep up those stairs at the beginning of the video, with someone stabilizing her from behind. Would she be able to work on the lunar surface? But since the suit weighs 325 pounds, and she was doing a demo in full Earth gravity, I think I should keep my comments to fat old myself.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, I had some snarky thoughts about that as well. But I imagine going up stairs would be even more challenging in the older style suits.
LikeLiked by 1 person