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Next-gen lunar boots R&D

Swatches | March 1, 2026 | By:

Close-up of a lunar boot test setup, featuring a white boot, metallic surfaces, and various wires and sensors in a complex arrangement.
A boot that’s part of a NASA lunar surface spacesuit prototype is readied for testing inside a thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The thick aluminum plate at right represents the frigid surface of the lunar South Pole, where Artemis III astronauts will confront conditions more extreme than any previously experienced by humans. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Morgan Campbell, an aerospace life support systems soft goods specialist at David Clark Co., presented the session “Creating the Artemis Lunar Boots” at Emerging Technologies Conference last November, detailing the challenges in their development.

An ever-present danger to the astronauts’ protective gear are micrometeroids and the sticky, sharp and electrically charged lunar dust called regolith. “[Regolith] has been compared to powdered glass because there’s no erosion,” Campbell says. Because of this, as few needle holes as possible must be used to minimize the possibility of lunar dust getting in.

The boots, which are integrated into the spacesuit, must also be insulated because astronauts on Artemis III and beyond will travel to the moon’s South Pole, where temperatures can be as low as -334° F. Campbell says they are experimenting with various materials layered together and compared Beta cloth and Ortho-Fabric, materials used in previous missions.

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