My name is Benedikt Stingl, I have been involved with the Austrian Space Forum since a little more than 10 Years. This involvement ranges from giving small presentations up to helping to organize the First Austrian Space Ball, which was held on the 13th of January 2018. I was also active during the AMADEE-18 mission in the Mission Support Center (MSC) for one week as Procedures.

Benedikt Stingl at the Procedures Console (c) OeWF (Florian Voggeneder)

Recently I have started my biggest commitment in my entire career in the organization. I am writing my bachelor thesis about the load carriage system for the next generation of space suit simulators. The development of this next generation has started a short time ago and I am honoured to be involved since the beginning.

Especially the load carriage system may be developed as early as possible because nearly every other component evolves around it, making it also the part with the biggest human-machine interaction. You can imagine that medical concerns have a huge impact and will play an enormous role.

Until recently I have carried out a scope over different systems and areas that involve load carriage. I found similarities with hiking and (forced) marches during military actions in terms of the load carried, the time of the carriage and the consequences in terms of injury.

Spacesuit design needs a flowchart ;-)

My personal background is mechanical engineering, so it was new to me to research these medical aspects. Generally speaking I had to start from scratch! In my studies I had learned to design systems that involve machines and metal as material only. Now I must deal with designs involving the complex shapes of humans and inhomogeneous materials such as textiles and fibres.

Soon I will start to evaluate the different carriage systems not only on their ability to transmit the load carried but also on thermal aspects and their implementation in a rear entry suit. After an evaluation of our Biomedical Engineers (BMEs) and Analog Astronauts we may start with a wireframe model.

I am not only involved in my thesis here but also the virtual reality station in our spacesuit lab in Innsbruck. This station was in use during the AMADEE-18 mission, as part of the V(R)ITAGO experiment, and just recently we received updates from the PIs in Italy. We evaluated them in terms of visuals and handling and sent them our feedback. We certainly had a lot of fun trying them and I look forward to new updates!

My intern colleague Nils Kaufmann is conducting a Dragon docking in virtual reality.

Already established is a time slot of one to two hours every Friday after the lab is cleaned where we try out other simulations such as the ISS simulator. I personally was amazed by the details and the possibilities in this simulation. Especially the docking of the Dragon and the EVA were a highlight to me.

I am certain that my time here will be spent well and I am excited for the spacesuit simulators to return via ship from Oman, because I haven´t had no opportunity until now to see which solution for load carriage was used during the AMADEE-18 simulation.

Author: Benedikt Stingl

Further information:

• AMADEE-18 Mars Simulation Oman
• Aouda spacesuit simulator