The Engineering Behind Prada’s New Moon Suit

Prada just unveiled the high-tech underwear NASA astronauts will wear on the moon. Yes, *that* Prada.

On June 7, the fashion house and Axiom Space pulled the cover off their Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment at Prada’s flagship store in New York City. It has stirrup pants, thumbhole sleeves, and Prada’s signature red stripe. It looks like designer activewear. It is actually life support equipment. And the technology inside it took 60 years and one nearly disastrous spacewalk to get right.

Here is the problem this garment solves, and it is not the one you would guess.

🎥 Watch the complete breakdown here:

Space Isn’t Cold — It’s a Thermos

Ask anyone what space is like and they will say it is cold. Technically true. But the biggest thermal danger for an astronaut inside a spacesuit is not freezing. It is overheating.

That sounds backwards until you remember what a vacuum actually is. Heat leaves your body three ways: radiation, conduction, and convection. Conduction and convection both need matter, air or water, to carry the heat away. A vacuum has neither. That is why a thermos keeps your coffee hot. The vacuum gap between its inner and outer walls gives heat almost no path out. A spacesuit, in other words, is a thermos with a person inside.

And that person is a heater. A resting human body puts out about 100 watts, roughly the warmth of an old-school incandescent light bulb. An astronaut doing hard physical work can push out 500 watts or more. Now wrap that heater in an airtight, multi-layered, insulated suit. All that heat has nowhere to go. No breeze, no evaporating sweat, no escape. Left unchecked, you would slowly cook inside your own equipment.

NASA learned this the hard way.

The Spacewalk That Nearly Ended in Disaster

June 1966, Gemini 9. Astronaut Gene Cernan steps out for only the second American spacewalk in history. His mission: work his way to the back of the spacecraft and strap on a rocket-powered maneuvering unit. His suit has no liquid cooling at all. The only thing keeping him cool is oxygen blowing through the suit, the same basic idea as a fan cooling you on a hot day. Which works fine, right up until it doesn’t.

Cernan had no handholds, no foot restraints, almost nothing to grab. Every motion in the stiff, pressurized suit was a wrestling match. He later said the suit had all the flexibility of a rusty suit of armor. His heart rate soared. He sweated so heavily that the cooling airflow was completely overwhelmed, and his visor fogged over from the inside.

Picture it: effectively blind, exhausted, floating 160 miles above the Earth, and the only fix available is rubbing your nose against the faceplate to clear a tiny peephole. That is a real thing he did. After more than two hours he made it back inside, drenched, having lost several pounds of water weight in a single spacewalk. NASA cancelled the maneuvering unit test on the spot.

The lesson was brutal and clear. Blowing gas over a sweating human cannot keep up with a working astronaut. You need something far better at moving heat. You need water.

Why Water Changed Everything

Water conducts heat roughly 25 times better than air. It can soak up enormous amounts of energy and carry it away through a thin tube. British researchers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment had already prototyped the first water-cooled garment for pilots back in 1962. NASA took that idea and engineered it into Apollo.

The result was the Liquid Cooling Garment, the direct ancestor of what Prada just put on a mannequin in SoHo. It is a snug, full-body layer of underwear threaded with around 300 feet of thin plastic tubing held right against the skin. Cool water flows through the tubes, picks up your body heat by conduction, then carries it out of the suit to the backpack. Astronauts nicknamed it the spaghetti suit, and one look at the tubing tells you why.

The Apollo version could pull about 2,000 BTU per hour out of an astronaut’s body, just under 600 watts of cooling. To put that in perspective, that is like strapping a small bedroom air conditioner to your back and walking around the moon with it.

The Backpack That Sweats

Here is my favorite part, and it is the part almost nobody talks about. Where does the heat actually go?

You cannot just blow it overboard, because there is no air. You cannot dump the hot water, because you need that water. Apollo’s answer was a gorgeous piece of engineering called the sublimator.

Inside the backpack sits a stack of porous metal plates made of sintered nickel, essentially metal riddled with thousands of microscopic holes. A separate supply of feedwater is pushed up against those plates, where it is exposed to the vacuum of space. The instant the water meets that vacuum, it freezes into a thin layer of ice. Then the ice sublimates, meaning it skips the liquid phase entirely and turns straight into vapor, which drifts off into space, hauling heat away with it. The warm water returning from the astronaut’s cooling garment flows past those cold plates, dumps its heat, and loops back to the body to collect more.

The most elegant part is that the whole system is self-regulating, with no thermostat needed. Work harder, and the extra body heat sublimates the ice faster, which automatically boosts the cooling. The backpack literally sweats so the astronaut doesn’t have to. The entire reason Apollo moonwalkers could spend up to seven hours bouncing across the lunar surface, through a swing of hundreds of degrees, is a block of metal quietly exhaling ice vapor behind their heads.

A 1969 Design, Still Flying

That design won. The spaghetti suit and the sublimator flew on Skylab, on the Space Shuttle, and they are still on the International Space Station today. The undergarment NASA’s spacewalkers wear right now traces directly back to 1969.

Which is genuinely impressive, and also kind of the problem. Each garment requires tubing hand-threaded through mesh fabric, slow and fiddly work, and the suits themselves are decades old. NASA’s current ISS spacesuits were designed back in the 1970s. A technology that brilliant deserves a second act, and that is exactly where the story turns toward Milan.

How Prada Helped Design NASA’s Artemis Moon Suit

For the new AxEMU suit, the one NASA astronauts will wear at the lunar South Pole, Axiom Space and Prada rebuilt the cooling garment from scratch.

Instead of threading tubes through mesh by hand, the cooling channels are built directly into the garment as it is made, woven right into the fabric. That is faster to manufacture, and it keeps the tubes pressed consistently against the skin, which is exactly where you want them for efficient heat transfer. A second loop of larger air tubes washes fresh oxygen across the astronaut’s face, sweeping exhaled carbon dioxide back to the scrubbers with every breath.

The redesign is not cosmetic. It needs to be better, because the destination is much harsher.

Why NASA’s Artemis Moon Suit Needs Better Cooling

Apollo landed near the moon’s equator in gentle morning sunlight. Artemis astronauts are headed somewhere far less forgiving: the lunar South Pole, a landscape of long shadows and permanently dark craters. There, stepping from sunlight into shadow can mean a temperature swing of more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Your cooling system has to handle blazing sun one minute and a deep freeze the next, sometimes within a single stride.

And Prada is not just there for the red stripe. The company’s materials expertise went into the suit’s white ballistic outer fabric, built to resist tearing and to shed razor-sharp lunar dust, which is one of the nastiest hazards on the moon. The garments are modular, with swappable, individually sized components, and they may even be custom-fitted to each astronaut. Bespoke tailoring, for the moon.

Fashion Has Always Kept Astronauts Alive

If a luxury fashion house building spacesuits sounds absurd, here is some history that should reframe it.

The Apollo suits, the most famous garments ever made, were sewn by ILC Dover, a division of Playtex. Yes, the bra company. Their seamstresses held tolerances of a sixty-fourth of an inch, because a single misplaced stitch could kill an astronaut. There were no shortcuts and no second chances. Fashion has been keeping humans alive on the moon from the very beginning. Prada is simply the latest house to take up the needle.

The Bigger Picture

The new garment will likely be tested aboard the International Space Station, and in NASA’s giant training pool, before Artemis 4 carries it to the lunar surface. But step back and the larger significance comes into focus.

If we are serious about a future where thousands of people live and work in space, spacesuits cannot be hand-built one at a time the way they were in 1969. They have to be manufactured like clothing: repeatable, scalable, fitted to the individual. That is the quiet revolution hiding inside a garment with a red stripe. The future of spaceflight runs, at least a little bit, through a fashion house.

Who knew the boldest fashion statement on the moon would be staying cool?

References

1. Gohd, C. (2026, June 8). It’s very aesthetically pleasing”: Prada and Axiom just revealed the stylish cooling suit Artemis astronauts will wear under their spacesuits on the moon

2. Axiom Space. (2026, June). Axiom Space, Prada unveil inner layer of next-gen lunar spacesuit

3. National Air and Space Museum. Almost blind and completely exhausted: Gene Cernan’s disastrous Gemini spacewalk.

4. Hackaday. (2019, August 19). Apollo’s PLSS and the science of keeping humans alive in space

5. Wikipedia. *Liquid cooling and ventilation garment*.

6. National Air and Space Museum. *Liquid Cooling Garment, S# 067, Apollo*.

7. NPR. (2024, October 17). *Prada and Axiom Space reveal modernized NASA spacesuits*.