Add to that the shock and horror of nurses and doctors and ambulance teams arriving in spacesuits to treat people or remove them from their homes and you have a story that cannot be overplayed.
Hiding from big data The caveman in space ReprintsOne thing these new spacesuits share is that they look like they could have come from early illustrations in science fiction or even a vintage episode of "Doctor Who".
The winner (pictured right) features vivid-blue electroluminescent wire and patches, exposed bearings and natty collapsing pleats to improve an astronaut's mobility.Other new spacesuits are in development, including the one pictured above being modelled by its inventor, Dava Newman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This discovery calls into question efforts to design new spacesuits for America's much-vaunted plan to send people back to the moon, and eventually to Mars.The instinct of engineers at NASA, America's space agency, is to improve on the suits used three and a half decades ago during the Apollo project by making them less rigid.
That simplifies the mission enormously by removing the need for landing rockets, spacesuits and complicated orbital-insertion manoeuvres.
There will also be a moon lander, and eventually a mission to Mars, both of which will justify a lot more unmanned exploration of those two bodies before any frail human beings dip the toes of their spacesuits in the regolith.
She explains the various gizmos, from diving bells to spacesuits, that have enabled humans to live and work in conditions that would otherwise prove fatal.
In spacesuits, it has been thought of as bad.Dr Carr, however, has been reviewing the performance of the Apollo suits by looking at footage shot on the moon and by studying the astronauts' own thoughts.
In May Orbital Outfitters, an American firm, unveiled its design for the pilot and fare-paying passengers on Lynx, a reusable spaceplane being developed by XCOR Aerospace, another Californian company.Many of the features of existing spacesuits date back to the Apollo missions and some to the g-force suits used by U2 high-altitude spy planes in the 1950s.
There is a complete absence of fresh food, for instance, as well as isolation from the environment and simulated spacesuits to make movement clumsy and going outside a chore.
The isolation experiment, a mock Mars mission, complete with research work and lava-field expeditions in simulated spacesuits, has reached its half-way point.
