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NASA’s Next Generation Space Suit

In this film Vice meets the two guys who are creating the next generation of space suits from scratch, something that has traditionally taken teams of people to achieve.

When Ted Southern and Nik Moiseev first met back in 2007, they came from two very different worlds. Nik had spent over 20 years working in the Soviet Union and Russia as an engineer of cutting edge garments. Ted was an artist and sculptor who had studied at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and worked as an apprentice at a costuming studio in Manhattan.

When the two teamed up and entered NASA’s Centennial Challenge, a competition sponsored by NASA, their new five-finger collaboration proved good enough to place second in the subsequent glove competition. With a second prize finish and a $100,000 grant from NASA, they launched Final Frontier Design, a business that aims to design the future of protective space garments.

Space suits aren’t mere clothes. Created using complicated mixtures of cloth, machine, and architecture, they help provide a portable environment for the fragile human body as it ventures out into space. The earliest space suit designs were hard, armour-like suits; later, Playtex, the women’s underwear maker, would pioneer the relatively soft, relatively flexible suits used by astronauts today.

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  1. are they intentionally trying to look like Buzz Lightyear