Axiom Moon Suit Passes First Design Review in 40 Years

The next Moon suit has cleared the gate every NASA spacesuit has to clear before it can be built for flight. NASA and Axiom Space have completed the critical design review, or CDR, for the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit — the AxEMU — and the agency announced the milestone on Friday, November 13, 2026. NASA's Artemis account posted the news at 2:39 p.m. Central Time, and SpaceNews reported the completed review the same day.

The number that frames the milestone is 40. NASA calls this the first critical design review on a NASA EVA spacesuit in over 40 years, a span that reaches back past the shuttle-era suits astronauts still wear on spacewalks from the International Space Station. Those suits were designed in another era, for orbit. The AxEMU is designed for the lunar surface: dust, one-sixth gravity, and work that includes bending, kneeling and collecting geological samples.

A critical design review is an engineering gate, not a flight clearance. Passing it signals that the design is mature enough to move into final testing — that the drawings are settled and the remaining arguments are about performance, not architecture. The suit isn't certified, it isn't ready for a mission, and NASA didn't attach a new delivery date to the announcement. The CDR is progress, stated in the narrowest honest terms, and that's how both partners are presenting it.

The testing behind the review has been physical for a while. NASA and Axiom teams have run the suit underwater in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at Johnson Space Center and in simulated lunar gravity, letting astronauts practice moving and working in one-sixth gravity. In September 2025, two astronauts wore fully integrated AxEMU units at the same time, the first dual-suit run. Axiom also built the suit's exterior with an unlikely partner: the Italian fashion house Prada worked on the outer layer's design.

The suit's job description is written by the Artemis program. NASA astronauts will wear the AxEMU during the first Artemis lunar landing, and the current program plan puts an in-space demonstration aboard the International Space Station in 2027, where the suit could be used on a spacewalk before it ever touches lunar soil. A lunar landing mission follows later in the decade under the current schedule.

What's left is the long part: qualification. The design can now be frozen and tested as a system — life support, mobility, communications and the pressure garment together — against the requirements a lunar surface imposes. Reviews like this one are where a spacesuit stops being a prototype program and becomes a product with a test record. The AxEMU crossed that line on November 13. The Moon is still on the other side of the testing.