Prada is making plans to expand into space, after the luxury Italian fashion brand inked a deal to help design the suits for NASA’s next moon landing.
Prada will team up with Axiom Space, a space infrastructure developer, to create the lunar space suits for NASA’s Artemis III mission, the fashion house said in a statement on its website.
The mission, planned for 2025, will see humans return to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. It will also see the first woman set foot on the lunar surface.
“Our decades of experimentation, cutting-edge technology, and design know-how—which started back in the ’90s with Luna Rossa challenging for the America’s Cup—will now be applied to the design of a space suit for the Artemis era.”
“The constantly forward-thinking ethos of Prada for humanity has broadened to [the] desire of adventure and to brave new horizons: space,” said Prada’s group marketing director Lorenzo Bertelli.
Suit details
Few new details were given about the suits themselves, but it is likely Prada will continue to develop a prototype unveiled by Axiom in March.
The group won a $228 million contract last year to design NASA’s space suits as part of a bigger $1.3 billion package to provide infrastructure for the 2025 Artemis III mission.
The suits have joints stitched to provide astronauts more flexibility than was offered to those on the last moonwalk in the early ’70s. They will also have an in-built HD camera to broadcast the trip back to Earth. They’re intended to enable the astronauts to better explore the moon’s surface and carry out scientific experiments.
A representative for Prada didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for more information on the company’s involvement in making the suits.
In Axiom’s statement, CEO Michael Suffredini hailed Prada’s expertise with “raw materials, manufacturing techniques, and innovative design concepts” to create a comfortable suit for NASA’s astronauts.
Prada won’t be the first ostensibly fashion-focused brand to design suits for astronauts.
Andrew Chaikin, an author who interviewed 23 Apollo astronauts for his book, wrote in Smithsonian Magazine that the International Latex Corp. (ILC) was enlisted to build suits for the likes of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin for the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
The company was more famous for designing Playtex bras and girdles, a niche that helped its designers create rubber garments that could survive the perilous elements of space, Chaikin wrote.
Each suit cost an estimated $100,000 to make, or nearly $840,000 today, and contained 21 layers of synthetics, neoprene rubber, and metallized polyester films.
In 1994 Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, wrote to the NASA team that designed his space suit to express his appreciation for the “Extravehicular Mobility Unit.”
“It turned out to be one of the most widely photographed spacecraft in history,” Armstrong wrote. “That was no doubt due to the fact that it was so photogenic.
“Equally responsible for its success was its characteristic of hiding from view its ugly occupant. Its true beauty, however, was that it worked. It was tough, reliable, and almost cuddly.”
