Automated Production and the Cost of Building a Suit

The Australian Space Agency's Moon to Mars Supply Chain Capability grant awarded to Metakosmos in March 2024 included building internal automated capability to increase suit production capacity.

That work runs alongside computational design methods developed with the University of Technology Sydney.

THE EXISTING COST STRUCTURE

A pressure garment is a layered assembly with hundreds of seams. Each seam is a potential leak path and each requires inspection.

Production has been substantially hand-executed by skilled technicians, with bespoke sizing meaning little transfers between articles. The result is a cost structure with almost no economies of scale.

WHAT AUTOMATION CHANGES

Parametric design generated computationally can drive automated cutting, forming and joining. Sizing becomes a parameter set rather than a fabrication decision, so a variant for a different anthropometric range is a computation rather than a redesign.

CONSISTENCY AND QUALIFICATION

Automated processes produce articles that are consistent between units.

Configuration control — knowing exactly what article was tested, in what state — is a requirement of any defensible evidence package. Hand-built articles with unit-to-unit variation weaken the test results generated from them, which links manufacturing method directly to what the PROVE apparatus can establish.

MATERIALS AND PROCESS TOGETHER

Material behaviour under the processing method matters alongside behaviour in service. A composite that performs well hand-laid can behave differently under automated processing.

Materials research through LABS has covered advanced materials and composites, including peer-reviewed work published in Elsevier's Carbon journal.

SOVEREIGN MANUFACTURING

Metakosmos has worked with CSIRO and the Department of Defence on production process improvement since 2020.

Sovereign capability in manufacturing terms means domestic production at required rate and quality, not domestic design alone. The hardware programme is built around domestic production capacity.