Sending on Mars: A Simulation
IF YOU LIVE IN the Portland, Oregon, area, you may have been surprised as you walked along the coast last August to see an astronaut dry-tooling up a cliff. “Why are you doing that?” you might have asked, to which he would have replied, “Testing”—namely, testing to see how well his suit would perform on extraterrestrial bodies like Mars. Many existing spacesuits are cumbersome, complicating surface exploration of other planets. Enter Trent Tresch, an innovator, explorer, and climber working with the open-source think tank Pacific Spaceflight (pacificspaceflight.com), whose goal is to create cheap, lightweight, maneuverable spacesuits. (Dr. Cameron Smith founded Pacific Spaceflight in 2013; Tresch joined the team in 2016.) We talked with Tresch about what it would be like to climb in space.
What was climbing in a spacesuit like?
This story is from the Issue 159 edition of Climbing.
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This story is from the Issue 159 edition of Climbing.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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