For decades, the spacesuit has been presented as the most advanced garment ever created by human engineering: a portable ecosystem capable of keeping a person alive in a vacuum, regulating their temperature, supplying oxygen and allowing them to move precisely hundreds of kilometers from Earth. However, in March 2019, that image of technological perfection was cracked by an unexpected detail: the size.
NASA had enthusiastically announced what was going to be the first spacewalk carried out exclusively by women. Astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch would prepare to leave the International Space Station on a routine mission. But just A few days before, the agency had to rectify: only one medium-sized torso was available ready for use. McClain, who had initially trained with a size largehe verified in orbit that the stocking offered him greater mobility and safety. The problem was that there weren’t two of them. The walk was rearranged and one of the positions was eventually filled by a male astronaut.
The episode generated headlines around the world and, with them, a simplified interpretation that still circulates: that “women’s” spacesuits are more expensive or difficult to produce. But what happened was something different, and in some ways more revealing. NASA suits, also known as EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit), are not designed as gender-differentiated garments, but as modular systems composed of interchangeable parts: arms, gloves, helmets and, above all, the rigid torso, the most critical piece for adjustment. These pieces exist in different sizes, but for years the operating inventory has been limited.
In a NASA statement, the agency clearly explained the situation: preparing a suit for a spacewalk is not as simple as choosing a size in a closet. Each configuration requires hours of adjustment, testing and verification in microgravity conditions. At that time, only one medium-sized torso was ready for immediate use, and preparing another in time was not feasible without compromising safety or the mission schedule.
Rather than a question of differentiated costs, the incident revealed a design heritage. For much of the history of space exploration, the bodies for which systems were designed were relatively homogeneous: military pilots, mostly men, with fairly precise height and build ranges. As the astronaut corps diversified, that standardization began to show its limits.
The price of a complete spacesuit, when considering its development, maintenance and operation, can reach hundreds of millions of dollars. But It is not an individual product that is manufactured from scratch for each astronaut, nor a “male” and a “female” version with different prices. It is an extremely complex, reusable technological platform, the cost of which depends on the engineering, logistics and lifespan of the system. Where the economic factor does appear is in the need to redesign or expand this system to adapt it to a greater diversity of bodies. And that implies investment.
NASA claimed that, Already in 2017, close to 200 million dollars had been invested without having an operational suitand in 2021 the figure exceeded 400 million without the development being completed. More than 400 million and there was no complete design.
Reports from NASA’s Office of Inspector General have been pointing out delays and cost overruns in the development of new spacesuits for years, in part precisely due to the need to modernize legacy designs. The Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon, has incorporated this lesson from the beginning. The new suits, developed in collaboration with the company Axiom Space, seek to offer a much wider range of sizes and greater adaptability, with the explicit objective that any qualified astronaut can use them without structural limitations.
What happened on the spacewalk involving Anne McClain and Christina Koch was not an anecdotal failure, but a small crack that allowed us to see something deeper: even in the most technologically advanced environments, design decisions carry the history of those who made them. Space, for a long time, was designed for a specific type of body: military pilots. Perhaps there lies the true learning of that episode: that Space exploration not only requires more powerful rockets or more resistant materials, but also a broader look at who is part of this journey.