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All right, this could very well be a future history WI as well, but given possible alternate developments in ESA's past, I'm rather posting this discussion here.


To date, the European Space Agency has not developed a spacesuit of its own, particularly due to not having its own manned capability yet. ESA astronauts have thus relied on NASA's ACES flight suits and EMU extravehicular suits, or RKA's Sokol flight suits and Orlan extravehicular suits.

The only ESA spacesuit to date that I know of is the Aouda.X, but that was a surface EVA suit prototype/demonstrator/simulator. It was developed in cooperation with the Austrian Space Forum back in the 2000s. So, there isn't any finished true spacesuit project so far.

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to devise a design for a purely European flight sut and a (non-plantetary) extravehicular suit. Basically, spitball any ideas, even discarded/archived OTL ones that I never heard of before, but keep it plausible.

The lower end of the challenge's timescale should be the early 1980s and the upper end should be the near future - say, the 2020s or 2030s.

I'd love to hear your ideas on this. :)
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