Final Frontier Design Offers Space Suit For $10k Donation On KickStarter

Want A Space Suit? That'll Be $10k

With more opportunities to go into space coming along every day, it might just be time to invest in your own space suit.

Luckily for you, one company is now ready to give you that chance.

Final Frontier Design (FFD), a company run by an inventor from Brooklyn named Ted Southern and Russian space suit engineer Nikolay Moiseev, has placed its design for a commercial space suit on crowd-source funding website Kick Starter.

And if you pledge $10,000 or more you can get one yourself.

It might sound ambitious, but FFD has real space suit pedigree. The company was born out of a 2009 Nasa challenge to build a working, flexible glove for astronauts working in space and eventually it came in second place.

As a result FFD picked up a $100,000 prize to move forward with its designs and in 2011 won a contract with the Johnson Space Center.

Now FFD is pushing forward to create a whole space suit, designed to be manufactured much more cheaply than Nasa's own kit and be suitable for the growing space tourism market.

They're looking for $20,000 to "bring our vision of a lightweight, inexpensive, and highly functional space suit to the new space industry".

The '3G' suit will feature upgrades over their previous model, including: "a higher operating pressure, a carbon fiber waist ring, a retractable helmet, and improved gloves and glove disconnects. Our plan is to complete construction of this 3G Suit before 2013".

The suits will be used while space travellers are inside vehicles - in case of an emergency, the suit would keep an astronaut alive just like an oxygen mask in an airliner.

But to make them a reality they need funding. For $10 you get an FFD badge, for $40 you get a badge and a T-shirt. Higher donations can net you a communications cap or a pair of "anti-G" tights. For $3,500 you get a helmet and a studio visit, while $10,000 gets you the complete suit.

"Space suits are expensive," the company said. "Every little bit helps us to pay for the materials, equipment and tooling required to make high technology safety garments.

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