NASA turns to a stripped-down Sortie Suit for the first Artemis landings

NASA has told Axiom Space to develop a simpler Sortie Suit for the first lunar landings, cutting mass and complexity to support a 2028 target. The same acceleration cancelled the Lunar Gateway, and ESA’s three guaranteed European astronaut flights were secured against Gateway hardware.

NASA is simplifying the spacesuit for its first Moon landings. Axiom Space will build a stripped-down variant, Ars Technica reported.

It is called the Sortie Suit. The aims are lower mass, less complexity and simpler interfaces with the SpaceX and Blue Origin landers. Certification duration requirements are being shortened as well, according to Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel member Charlie Precourt.

Axiom is the only supplier left. Collins Aerospace dropped out in 2024, and NASA leadership now meets Axiom six days a week.

The original requirements were the problem. Six spacewalks over 6.5 days, 210 days dormant, two hours in a permanently shadowed region, a set NASA’s own inspector general called over-burdensome.

All of it serves one date, landing by 2028. Administrator Jared Isaacman has streamlined rocket production and cancelled the Lunar Gateway, in a programme some countries already found too US-centric. That date is a target rather than a confirmed schedule.

That cancellation is where Europe enters. Gateway was scrapped in March.

Europe was building three of its modules. Lunar I-Hab, Lunar View and Lunar Link, from Thales Alenia Space, Airbus, Redwire and Beyond Gravity, at a cost of hundreds of millions of euros.

Those modules were not a contribution. They were one side of a barter. Europe also agreed to supply two more of the service modules that power Orion.

ESA secured three flight opportunities for European astronauts to travel to and work on the Gateway, under a memorandum signed in October 2020.

The Gateway no longer exists. The destination those seats were seats to has been cancelled. ESA and NASA have been in discussion since March, and no replacement has been announced.

Europe is still delivering its half regardless. It shipped the Artemis IV service module this year, years after TNW reported European hardware riding a US lander that failed.

So the suits being simplified are for missions with no European aboard. The first landings fly on SpaceX and Blue Origin vehicles.

Which is the question for ESA’s ministers rather than for Axiom. Europe still has the contractors and the lunar technology, and no longer has the mechanism that was going to put a European on the Moon.