An unlikely duo has teamed up to design spacesuits with the space tourism market in mind.
At first, Nikolay Moiseev, a long-time Russian Federal Space Agency employee, and Ted Southern, a costume designer who was the first to dress Victoria’s Secret models in angel wings, don’t seem like an obvious pairing. But to hear them talk about their shared passions—engineering, materials, and space suits—it suddenly starts to make sense. The two met in 2009, at a NASA competition to design a better space-suit glove, and went on to found Brooklyn-based Final Frontier Design, where they are prototyping lighter, cheaper space suits aimed at the burgeoning commercial space flight industry, led by Virgin Galactic and SpaceX.
Yesterday, Southern and Moiseev exceeded their funding goal for their Third Generation Spacesuit on Kickstarter by almost $10,000.