Seventy years of pressure garment engineering across US, Soviet, Russian and incoming Chinese programs. Every variant. Every subsystem. Every failure. Primary sources—not Wikipedia summaries.
Normalized across pressure, mass, life support, mission role and failure modes
"Even a simple IVA suit needs water survival and cockpit visibility contingencies"
"Suit performance cannot be separated from translation aids and workload planning"
"Lunar EVA required not just survival but sustained human work capability"
"Endurance and traversal demands exposed the need for mobility, dust robustness, and rover integration"
"Dedicated EVA architecture dramatically improved work efficiency vs IEVA"
"Long-life EVA programs shift from design problems to sustainment, anomaly and industrial-base problems"
Across 70 years and three space programs, the same subsystem remained the single most persistent mission limiter: the glove. Hand fatigue in Gemini IV made America's first EVA nearly catastrophic. Cold-object handling plagued Apollo. Pre-Phase VI EMU glove injuries—numbness, bladder bunching, palm-bar wear-through into hand—drove formal NASA injury surveillance in the 1990s.
The archive documents 12 distinct glove development lines across US and Soviet programs. Not what was built—but why each iteration failed to solve the fundamental physics of dexterity under 3.7–5.8 psi. The Russian BERKUT glove of 1965 and the ISS Phase VI of 2002 share the same core failure: torque and thermal performance trade against each other at the finger joint level.
Read Subsystem AnalysisKRECHET-94 and the Orlan family both use rear-entry hard upper torso. Not accidental — it solved donning alone on a lunar surface without ground crew. Traced from 1967 through modern suitport concepts.
Explore KRECHET →2013. ISS. Parmitano's helmet filled with water. Vision impaired, comms degraded, breathing compromised. Water separator blockage in the enhanced EMU's cooling loop. Potentially lethal. Full forensic breakdown here.
Read Failure Case →Third major space power's EVA program documented in the same structured engineering format as US and Soviet workbooks. Feitian EVA suit subsystem decomposition and roadmap. Imminent.
Get notified →No euphemisms. Sourced from NASA, OIG reports, and Soviet technical archives.
Water entered Luca Parmitano's helmet during EVA — vision impaired, comms degraded, breathing compromised
→ Cooling-water management is a primary safety-critical function, not a nuisance issue. Contamination tolerance must be designed in from day one
Aging suits, obsolescence, contractor quality issues, supply-chain weaknesses — OIG 2025 flagged as mission risk
→ Industrial-base fragility becomes a technical failure mode in long-lived fleets. Supplier resilience must be a first-class design and program requirement
Suit mass exceeded or stressed downstream lander allocations; requirements breadth and subsystem mass growth degraded feasibility
→ Exploration programs need firm mass control and stable mission assumptions before subsystem elaboration begins. Lock the budget model early
High-pressure pure oxygen atmosphere drastically increased flammability and toxicity consequences
→ Atmosphere, materials, and operations must be treated as a single integrated safety system from day one
Sixty years of pressure garment failures, near-misses and hard lessons — documented from primary sources. NASA technical reports, OIG audits, Zvezda records. The kind of archive that takes months to build and seconds to trust.
