Wired Science

NEW YORK -- In a dorm room-sized office near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a lanky man in an inflated spacesuit dances. He hops, shimmies and boogies. He stretches his arms, sweeps his hands over his head, twists his torso and lifts a bent leg in the air. At one point he lurches over, as if to scoop up a rock on Mars.

The guy in the spacesuit is artist and designer Ted Southern. Videotaping his performance is Nikolay Moiseev, a Russian mechanical engineer and Southern’s partner in founding Final Frontier Design, a startup company that hopes to craft affordable yet highly capable spacesuits for a burgeoning commerical spaceflight industry.

Just moments before, the suit resembled a saggy scarecrow’s skin stitched together from plastic kiddie pools. But as it inflates, a crude simulation of the spacesuit prototype’s behavior in a vacuum, the metamorphosis is shocking.

Every scrap puffs into purpose under pressure: a joint, an ergonomic contour, a clever reinforcement, all of which permits fluid movement not afforded by spacesuit designs used today.

“The current options are limited, expensive, heavy and not very functional. We think we can offer real improvement in terms of both performance and cost,” Southern said.

Southern and Moiseev met at a 2007 NASA competition to design a new spacesuit glove. Motivated in 2009 by their second-place $100,000 win, the duo now designs spacesuits from a workshop in the industrial boonies of Brooklyn, directly right across the street from a popular hipster bar.

“We both wanted to go beyond gloves to a full suit, and we recognized a new market in the suborbital spaceflight industry,” Southern said.

The company recently launched a $20,000 Kickstarter campaign to develop its “3G” spacesuit. If funded, they’ll spend the cash creating a prototype to vie for NASA’s picky certification. After that they plan to sell lightweight, flight-approved models for about $50,000 a piece.

Wired recently visited Final Frontier Design’s headquarters. Get an exclusive look inside in this gallery.