13 of the Strangest Spacesuits NASA Ever Imagined

As detailed in our February 1961 issue, Republic Aviation came up with this prototype lunar EVA suit. It's a little ... clunkier than what astronauts actually wore during the Apollo missions. The Republic design featured a mostly hard shell design with tripods in the event the astronaut wanted to rest. It also was built to be a whole living environment, with the astronaut having enough room to eat inside the suit.

In 1962, Deke Slayton, a Mercury 7 astronaut who would be grounded until the mid-1970s by a heart condition, tested out this variation on the Republic moon suit. Built by Grumman, this version was designed to be tethered, with a power system and air supply attached to the lander.

Starting in 1963, NASA worked with Litton Industries to develop an EVA suit. Based on designs for an Air Force vacuum chamber, this was the second edition of the hard EVA suit designed by Siegfried Hansen. Very sci-fi.

While many moon suit designs were proposed, this one was certainly one of the most unusual, featuring a very narrow field of view (likely) to protect an astronaut's eyes from the sun. It also kind of looks like the Awesome Android from Marvel Comics.

While NASA was busy building a path to the Moon, the United States Air Force recruited its own astronaut corps to perform space reconnaissance aboard what would've been the first space station. Essentially they would have used Mercury and Apollo capsules to dock to the Manned Orbiting Lab. The station never got beyond an uncrewed prototype, but the USAF did develop the suit on the right, with a stranger helmet than the NASA compatriot on the left.

From 1966 through the 1990s, NASA Ames worked on a series of hard space suits designed for greater mobility. This is one of the earlier models, from 1966. That's inventor Vic Vykukal inside.

The AX-5, from a 1988 photo. Though bulkier than its predecessors, the suit was designed to give more freedom of movement to the astronaut while requiring less air pressure.

The first space shuttle astronauts were flying a kind of craft no space agency had flown before – a genuine spaceplane design. So NASA, being NASA, was exceedingly cautious about their safety, requiring crew members on STS-1 through STS-4 to wear these Shuttle Ejection Escape Suits in the event of an emergency.

The getup was based on suits worn by high-altitude Air Force jet pilots, and was designed to work in tandem with an ejection seat. The suits weren't designed for EVAs in space, but rather in case NASA had to abort a mission part of the way to space, and astronauts needed to survive an ejection from a supersonic craft.

In 2005, President George W. Bush announced the Constellation program, an audacious space exploration program that would build the first deep space rockets and crewed vehicles since the Apollo era. It included a return to the moon and a mission to Mars. While the Obama administration largely scrapped the program (save the Orion capsule and Space Launch System), some components of it were tested, including these spacesuits designed for lunar EVA.

A variation of the Z-1, made of harder materials. Initial vacuum chamber tests will take place in 2020.

Before becoming deputy administrator of NASA, Dava Newman made her name with the BioSuit, a design inspired by the neck muscles of giraffes. The suit regulates pressure in a way that enables it to be form fitting. MIT is creating this suit.