One day, not long from now, everybody will need a spacesuit, whether it’s for a quick suborbital flight to Australia or a weeks-long jaunt to the newly discovered mineral baths on Mercury. When that time comes, two dudes from Brooklyn will be ready.
One of them, Ted Southern, designs Broadway costumes and angel wings for Victoria’s Secret models. The other, Nikolay Moiseev, is a Russian-born engineer. Together from the Final Frontier Design studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they are reinventing astronaut wear for a new era of space travel.
The two met by chance at a NASA contest five years ago and realized their mix of artistry and engineering skills was strong enough to build a company. But this is Brooklyn, where everything is handmade and local, so they’ve started teaching aspiring cosmonauts the basics of DIY spacesuit building, too.
For $550 (equipment included), students at the 3rd Ward design workshop have learned casting and molding, taking small steps (for a man) toward making their own suits. They don’t walk out ready to board the International Space Station — Southern says it would be “preposterous” to actually make a whole suit in a six-class session — but they do craft a finger and part of the helmet, while learning how the rest of the process works.
The studio houses a vacuum-chamber box Southern designed to test the integrity of gloves. To try out other garments, they inflate them with an air compressor and adjust regulators on the suit. Most of the fabric they use is commercially available heat-seal coated nylon; the same stuff used in river rafts and blimps.
Real would-be moonwalkers shell out about $50,000 for a full Final Frontier suit, which is still a steal compared to the $250,000 outfit NASA uses now.
And that’s the point of Final Frontier: to address pesky astronaut pet peeves, by making gloves more flexible, equipment more affordable and spacesuits easier to put on. It takes more than two months to produce one suit from scratch, but they plan to make about one suit a week if they get enough orders to scale up.
“There’s a whole slew of private space companies coming online that want to send humans into space,” Southern says. “That sector needs spacesuits. They’re not served by current providers. That’s who we see as our customers.”
There is a small catch, though.
“It’s really early in the private space industry now. No one has sent up people yet,” Southern says. “We’re kind of banking on an industry that doesn’t exist yet.”
Still, once daredevil Felix Baumgartner made his record-breaking sub-orbital jump Oct. 14, their phone started ringing. Other companies suddenly decided they wanted to outfit their own space jumpers.
One of those customers is the Spanish company zero2infinity, which expects to be selling sub-orbital rides in its giant balloons, similar to the ones Baumgartner used, by 2015. A ride in the balloon will cost about $140,000 and involve a two-hour ascent to 36 kilometers, where passengers will cruise for two hours. The company ordered one suit from Final Frontier for its test runs, and might order more if all goes well. So far, it’s Final Frontier’s only order.
“We think they’re doing a great job,” says Annelie Schoenmaker, zero2infinity’s external relations manager and legal officer. “It fits our purpose because their suits will be more flexible, more convenient than current spacesuits like the one that Felix wore, which was horrible to wear.”
(Baumgartner felt so claustrophobic in his suit that he nearly scratched his record breaking leap.)
With 20 years’ experience working for Russia’s space agency, Moiseev, 49, is the scientist of the operation. He grew passionate about space reading science fiction stories in high school. He even wrote an essay about plans to explore Mars one day, and got as close as anyone ever has to that dream when he walked 20 miles in a simulation of Mars’ atmosphere.
Like Southern’s work for clients such as Victoria’s Secret and Cirque du Soleil, Moiseev has side projects, too. One is a tsunami escape pod, an egg-shaped vehicle you could use to safely ride out a tidal wave.
Southern, 35, studied French horn at the University of Puget Sound. He always thought space was cool, but was more interested in the mechanics of design.
He’s a thin, tall guy who looks the part of casual artist more than a space engineer, wearing Adidas sneakers, khakis and a Quiksilver T-shirt as he bikes to work. But his appearance belies his serious intent; he recently had to register as an arms manufacturer to meet government regulations.
In 2009, the duo’s award-winning glove design outperformed current NASA standards, scoring them a $100,000 prize and a spot on NASA’s contractors list. The next year, in a Gowanus space shared with woodworkers, they built their first suit, a bright-yellow get-up that the Michelin man might wear if he were headed for the moon. It’s an intra-vehicular activity suit meant to be worn inside a spacecraft.
The next suit was built last December, in preparation for a visit from SpaceX, the California-based company that sent supplies to the ISS on its Dragon capsule in May, marking the first time a non-government ship had docked with the station.
That visit inspired them to move from Gowanus to the Navy Yard, which offered four times the room. “We’d have NASA personnel and astronauts come in. It was a little bit embarrassing,” Southern says.
For its third-generation suit, Final Frontier raised $27,000 via Kickstarter. Anyone who pitched in $550 got a pair of zero-gravity pants as a perk; one person who pitched in $10,000 got his own spacesuit.
So what does Moiseev think about working in a Brooklyn studio like a common art student? “I enjoy,” he says. “Working in big companies requires a lot of paperwork.”
For Southern, building space gear has boosted his credibility as a designer. “If you can build a spacesuit,” he says, “you can build these wings for Victoria’s Secret.”