The "horrible thing" is fingernail loss, which mostly occurs after a prolonged spacewalk. It occurs more often in poorly-fitted gloves and in women, but can occur in well-fitted gloves and in men.
Those are basically all of the facts in the article.
๐
I was expecting it to be a lot more exciting than something that also happens to your toes on earth if you do too much long distance running.
Yikes.
It seems to me our bodies are just not able to handle such thin proximity to the vacuum dependably, at least with current materials. This makes a great case for building dexterous proxy robots that astronauts or even someone on the ground depending on latency controls. Wouldn't need to be much more than a propellant based drone with human like arms on the side, a panoramic camera out of the top, and some form of tether. That and a headset and motion capture apparatus inside.
It's not like they'd lose a whole lot of dexterity and feeling, since their suits already limit those in person. With practice, wouldn't having realtime proxy hands like this:
Provide more or at worst roughly equivalent dexterity than operating through the current space mittens, and with less risk?
But, it isn't because of "proximity to the vacuum" at all.
It's the pressurized environment inside the gloves, and the design of those gloves that does it.
I'm not saying your idea isn't good, it is, and the last time I talked to anyone that was involved with NASA, they are working on something like that. He wouldn't say much other than that it was a program to use a kind of "drone" (his parentheses in the air) with hands to do basic EVA tasks to save the astronauts for things that require direct human expertise.
But, the nail loss thing has nothing to do with exposure to vacuum, or how thin the gloves are. If anything, the thickness of the gloves being as thick as they are may be a contributing factor because it limits movement (and, thus, circulation).
The gear they wear is all about preventing exposure to vacuum at all. There's a number of layers to the suits, including something like three (iirc) just to resist micro-meteorites. The damn things are expected to be almost tank like in their durability, and that requires thickness.
Reminds me of the old timey deep dive suits which had mechanical hands the "pilot" had to manipulate because the suit was too thick to use their hands
You just made me remember when I was I kid and at some museum they had a bunch of dive suits you could reach in and operate the mechanisms for the gripper hands. It was really cool.
That's exactly what I was thinking of actually lol
You mean an atmospheric diving suit. The most recently developed one by the US Navy cost a mere $113 million.
Sounds like a design challenge. Probably an exoskeleton power assist to the fingers.
I thought about sports tape
To me it reads like it's circulation and abrasion problems from trying to force the inflated gloves to move.
Share & discuss informative content on: Astrophysics, Cosmology, Space Exploration, Planetary Science and Astrobiology.
The Busy Center of the Lagoon Nebula
๐ญ Science
๐ Engineering
๐ Art and Photography
Other Cool Links
