A brief history

In the 1950’s and 60’s, NASA began development of a Space Activity Suit (SAS), which promised to replace the bulky gas-bladder suits used by astronauts of the time. SAS designs employed mechanical counterpressure (MCP) against the skin of the astronaut, providing necessary compression under vacuum. While the advantages in mobility and safety of an MCP approach were evident, and the efficacy of full-suit designs was promising, the project was ultimately abandoned by NASA in the 70’s due to material science constraints.

Suits today

In 2026, though the landscape of the space industry has altered greatly, spacesuits have not. Gas-bladder suits are set to be used in IVA/EVA applications on all up-coming space missions, including Artemis III & onward, and yet serious concerns remain about their readiness. At their core is an unchanged technological paradigm acknowledged to be flawed since the 60s. Gas-bladder suits contain breathing gas within a full-body airtight suit that maintains a high pressure; as a result, the suits are bulky, painful to wear for long durations, and incredibly difficult to fabricate, among myriad other issues. An MCP approach to spacesuits remains the obvious and necessary alternative.

Starsuit is at the forefront of today’s MCP development. In recent testing, we demonstrated incredible dexterity and comfort in a suit sleeve at 99.67% vacuum, validating the effectiveness and advantages of our approach. We are currently developing larger scale demonstrators for NASA and scaling our production to full suits that allow astronauts to do more.

The future of spaceflight

New ground takes its character from whoever works it. Worked by machines alone, space becomes a mine: owned from Earth, run by remote, home to no one. Worked by people, it becomes a place, with culture and stakes of its own. Machines will carry to space exactly the world that built them. People can carry something better.

People should go to space. Wherever work is hard, new, and has to be done right the first time, we already send people: to Antarctic stations, down to deep-sea welds, into twelve-hour surgeries. Robots, more capable every year, belong there by the millions, doing the known and the repeatable. The unknown goes to people. In the moment, people are what we trust.

That only works if a human hour in vacuum is productive. Today it is not. The limit is not the astronaut. The limit is the suit. What a person can do in space has barely advanced since the 1970s, because the suit has not.

The suit is the highest-leverage hardware in human spaceflight. Multiply what one person can do in an hour outside, and the line between "build a robot for it" and "have someone do it" moves. Manufacturing, assembly, repair, and field science become worth doing on the Moon.

The suit also decides who goes. Today a dozen people are in space, each in a hand-built suit. "The province of all humankind" stays a phrase until space becomes a workplace where skilled people work in real numbers. Falling launch costs open one door. A suit built by the thousand, and worked in all day, opens the other.

That is the suit Starsuit builds. Mechanical counterpressure is how space gets inhabited, not just operated. We build it with the researchers, governments, and companies who intend to be there.