By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – RTX Corp subsidiary Collins Aerospace is in talks with NASA to withdraw from the contract to build new spacesuits for astronauts on the International Space Station. people familiar with the discussions.
The contract was part of the $3.5 billion NASA awarded to both Collins and Axiom Space in 2022 to build new space suits for the ISS and future lunar missions. Collins initially received $97 million from the ISS suit development program, while it could compete with Axiom for additional funding to work on lunar space suits.
But Collins’ role in the program has been bumpy and development has fallen behind, and the company has been in discussions with NASA officials about how it can scale back its role in the program, the two people said.
“After a thorough review, Collins Aerospace and NASA mutually agreed to descope task orders for Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS),” a Collins spokeswoman said in a statement, referring to the spacesuit contract.
NASA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The spacesuit problems add to a long history of difficulties NASA has faced in modernizing what are essentially human-shaped spacecraft: bulky, complex systems that American astronauts use to venture beyond the ISS, some 400 kilometers above Earth for routine repairs to the spaceships. exterior of a laboratory the size of a football field.
The talks to end Collins’ contract come at a difficult time for NASA, as NASA faces a rare series of cancellations of astronaut spacewalks at the ISS this month due to the current, some 40-year-old spacesuits, which are managed by Collins.
The agency said a “space suit discomfort issue” forced the cancellation of two astronauts’ planned spacewalk on June 13, just before it was about to begin. Then a second attempt at the spacewalk on Monday was canceled minutes into the six-hour mission due to a water leak in US astronaut Tracy Dyson’s suit.
“There’s water everywhere… I got an arctic blast over my visor,” Dyson reported to mission control.
Previous spacewalks have been canceled due to problems with the station’s spacesuits, which have undergone only minor redesigns and renovations since their conception nearly half a century ago. NASA’s inspector general and its independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel have long pushed the agency to upgrade them.
Collins’ withdrawal from the new spacesuit program appears to put NASA’s future suits in the hands of Axiom, a startup that manages astronaut flights and builds its own space station. Axiom did not immediately return a request for comment.