NASA made no effort to request information or cooperation from Russia to incorporate impressive features in its spacesuit designs during their cooperation on the International Space Station (ISS), former US space official William Shepherd told Congress on Tuesday
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st September, 2021) NASA made no effort to request information or cooperation from Russia to incorporate impressive features in its spacesuit designs during their cooperation on the International Space Station (ISS), former US space official William Shepherd told Congress on Tuesday.
"The Russian space suit, which is fundamentally a different architecture from ours, it is quite durable, it is very simple and I think it has a lot of design attributes that our system does not," Shepherd told a hearing of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
However, NASA showed no interest in learning from superior elements in the Russian space suit design that were lacking in the US space suits, Shepherd said.
"But NASA made almost no effort to evaluate that and incorporate any of those design changes in our thinking. ... This is the lost opportunity in our relationship with the Russians in this partnership. One of my frustrations was we did very little at NASA in understanding and leveraging the things we had learned from our experience with the Russians and the Russian space agency," he said.
Shepherd recommended in his testimony that NASA officials should seek to reestablish closer relations with their Russian counterparts such as they enjoyed in the past.
