NASA Testing Tools, Spacesuits, Facilities to Prepare for Moonwalks

At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, teams are testing the tools and developing training approaches for lunar surface operations and Moonwalks astronauts will conduct during Artemis missions beginning in 2024. As part of a test series that occurred in August and September 2020 in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at Johnson, astronauts in a demonstration version of the exploration spacesuit and engineers in “hard hat” dive equipment simulated several different tasks crew will do on the surface of the Moon. The tests focused on evaluating Johnson’s facilities for Artemis spacewalk testing, development, and crew training, and will inform future mission planning, including how many spacewalks to conduct during a mission, how long they’ll be, and how far away from a lander the crew will travel.