NASA’s next moonwalk may be tripped up by the wardrobe department. A new report from the agency’s Office of Inspector General warns that the spacesuits needed for a planned 2028 lunar landing are running behind schedule and might not be ready before 2031. NASA’s existing suits for spacewalks outside the International Space Station date back to designs from more than 50 years ago, and its Apollo-era moon gear is no longer usable, Scientific American reports.
To fix that, NASA in 2022 tapped Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to build next-generation suits for both the moon and microgravity environments under contracts worth up to $3.1 billion—then planned to essentially rent the suits for missions.