HOUSTON \u2013 The countdown to the Moon doesn\u2019t start on a launchpad. For the team at Axiom Space in Houston, it starts years before, at a workbench, stitch by stitch.<\/p>\n
Falanne Jenkins is a self-taught seamstress with a background in aerospace. She never expected to be one of the hands behind one of this century\u2019s most historic projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has been amazing. I was the second seamstress hired, and I have been through the whole journey, all the late nights\u201d Jenkins said.<\/p>\n
Jenkins is helping sew the next generation of space suit for Axiom Space, a private Houston-based space developer that works closely with NASA. The suits aren\u2019t for the current Artemis II mission, a crewed flyby of the Moon, not a landing. They\u2019re being built for what comes next: Artemis III, targeted for 2027, and Artemis IV in 2028 \u2014 the first American moonwalking missions since the Apollo era more than 50 years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just see the future. The mission that they\u2019re on now, it\u2019s just the start of all the other things to come, and I am just really excited to see where this suit is going to go,\u201d Jenkins said.<\/p>\n
NASA has described the suit as a one-person spacecraft, built to hold pressure, provide air and protect against extreme conditions since these astronauts will be walking on the surface. The next lunar missions will take astronauts near the Moon\u2019s south pole, a region no human has ever explored.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are going to places that are colder than they\u2019ve ever been to. Some permanently shadowed regions that have never seen the light of the sun. So we need a suit that can get them there,\u201d said Michelle Stein, Senior Program Manager.<\/p>\n
The suits are designed for steep inclines, long walks and whatever the mission demands. That means rigorous testing, including setups that simulate reduced lunar gravity. During the Apollo missions, astronauts could walk on the Moon, but their suits made it harder than it needed to be. Axiom says this new suit is engineered to bend and move, replicating the real-world movements documented during Apollo to ensure astronauts spend more time doing their jobs and less time fighting their gear.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe took what was good from Apollo….we\u2019ve added redundancy systems and a lot of mobility,\u201d Stein said.<\/p>\n
What also sets this effort apart is where it\u2019s happening. According to Stein, building a space suit in Houston is itself a first.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have sewers here, and we have technicians here that make it in Houston. That has never been done before for a space suit, so that\u2019s very exciting to do it here,\u201d Stein said.<\/p>\n
For Jenkins, that local pride runs deep.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo know that the suits were made right here, it\u2019s just a point of pride,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Because when the next generation of astronauts take their first steps on the Moon, Houston won\u2019t just be watching history. This time, it\u2019s making it.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by KPRC Click2Houston – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON \u2013 The countdown to the Moon doesn\u2019t start on a launchpad. For the team at Axiom Space…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[58631,92458,56,58,57,39294,3951,92459],"class_list":{"0":"post-241221","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-artemis-ii","9":"tag-axiom-spacce","10":"tag-houston","11":"tag-houston-headlines","12":"tag-houston-news","13":"tag-moon","14":"tag-space","15":"tag-spacewalk"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}