Testing skinsuit

The Skinsuit is a tailor-made overall with a bi-directional weave specially designed to counteract the lack of gravity by squeezing the body from the shoulders to the feet with a similar force to that felt on Earth.

Floating in space, astronauts’ bodies adapt to weightlessness in ways that are not always wanted. Bone and muscle waste away as they have less work to do without gravity.

The Space Medicine Office of ESA’s European Astronaut Centre is managing a project that could help astronauts overcome back problems in space, simply by wearing this high-tech tight-fitting ‘skinsuit’.

Here the force the suit is producing is being  measured at the feet with a computer using force transducers in the soles of the footwear.