OT: Spacesuit gloves

Wasn't one of the major design problems with that glove the fact that it was inflated? The inflation pressure made a glove hard to be flexible. There needs to be a way to prevent the inflation from trying to straighten out the fingers..

IIRC, the one finger is intended to be outstretched to push buttons, and two fingers are intended to be able to grasp and pull. There was a lot of work to make the joints as flexible as possible and overcome the inflation pressure keeping them from bending.

And that is why it looks like a Hockey Glove.

That is a lot of what I remember from the 60's..

I think ultimately the spacesuit will converge on skintights using intelligent materials.

Also, remember that the glove has to handle near absolute zero, unfiltered solar radiation and a fair amount of cosmic radiation, plus a puncture can be fatal due to loss of pressure. This makes "thin" a difficult goal.

Personally, I think by the time you perfect the controls for an external, interchangeable tool, you're 3/4 of the way to a being able to do everything remotely from inside the craft/station if not from the ground (for low orbit)...

If you can remember the 60's then you weren't there!

technomaNge

Rich Grise schrieb:

Hello,

they had the problem of the pressure inside the suit. If the suit is filled with air under a pressure of 1 bar, the same as at sealevel on earth, the astronaut would need very much force to move his fingers, he would not be able to close the hand to a fist. With this high suit pressure, a tool chuck would be easier. But there is still the problem of bending the elbows and knees against the suit pressure. Therefore they decided to fill the suit with pure oxygen at a very low pressure of about 0.3 bar. Movement of arms, legs, hands and fingers was much easier with this low pressure. But the astronauts should breath pure oxygen for several hours before start of the rocket in order to prepare for the reduction of pressure without problems with decompression sickness. The nitrogen solved in the body under the normal pressure of 1 bar is washed out by breathing pure oxygen before. When the amount of nitrogen solved in the tissues of the body is low enough there are no problems with gas bubbles in the tissues when the pressure is rapidly reduced from 1 bar to 0.3 bar when the rocket is leaving the atmosphere. A low pressure of 0.3 bar inside the capsule and the suit saves a lot of material and weight, the walls of the capsule may be much thinner then.

Bye

Or was not old enough to particapate:-(

I still wonder about the gloves. I can envision finger-sized bellows, with a kevlar/silicone fingertip thingie. But for working, I still like the internal control box/tool chuck idea. :-)

Thanks! Rich

Well, a waldo operated from the ground would have to have some kind of smarts on board, so that the time delay doesn't make it break stuff.

And a waldo here, a processor there, and pretty soon we're talking real robots. ;-)

But I'd bet there are people who'd want to go just because it's there.

I would, if I had $20,000,000.00 to plop down, and another $10,000,000.00 to bribe them to not make me take the physical. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

now they have CANADARM for things like that.

any glove used needs to work with a 20kPa overpressure inside (or worse if the don't use pure oxygen)

I think much of the bulk is the arrangemnets that keep the volume constant as the fingers are flexed, there's also a lot of insulation there.

I just caught the tail-end. I graduated HS in '67, went to MIT (Minnesota Institute of Technology) until spring '68, and joined the Air Force to dodge the draft. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Have you ever tried designing such a chuck arrangement? It would have to handle pretty much everything from jewelers' screwdrivers to jackhammers. Not to mention electronic interfacing.

Hands are perfect man/tool interfaces. Well, we evolved with them, anyway.

Ove-gloves are already made of nomex and kevlar.

You know, if you'd actually try using Google instead of whining about googlers being the new AOLamers, you might not be so ignorant.

Have a nice slink.

Mark L. Fergerson

Cross-Slide wrote in rec.crafts.metalworking on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:21:59 -0800 (PST):

And all the other joints too. Search for "constant volume joint".

second paragraph:

I'm OK with this:

Saaaaaay, isn't that 6 of 9? (no corrections, please ;)

-- An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. -- Sir Winston Churchill