NEW YORK, June 8 — Italian luxury fashion house Prada has unveiled its latest design innovation for space exploration: a high-performance cooling garment that will be worn beneath NASA’s next-generation lunar spacesuits during future Moon missions.
Prada and Houston-based aerospace company Axiom Space officially introduced the new inner-layer garment, marking an unusual collaboration between aerospace engineering and luxury fashion.
The garment is designed for use with the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), the next-generation spacesuit that will support NASA’s Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. Artemis III, currently targeted for launch in 2026, aims to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years and land astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole.
Known as the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG), the suit is worn directly against the astronaut’s body and serves a critical role in regulating temperature during spacewalks.
Astronauts performing lunar surface operations can generate significant body heat during physically demanding activities that may last up to eight hours. To manage that heat, the garment incorporates a network of tubes that circulates cooled water across major muscle groups, absorbing and carrying away excess heat.
According to Axiom Space, the Prada-designed garment introduces a fully redundant cooling circuit, a first for this type of equipment.
The backup system is designed to activate automatically if the primary cooling loop fails, helping protect astronauts from overheating in the extreme conditions of the lunar environment.
In addition to temperature control, the garment assists with ventilation. A separate system delivers fresh oxygen across the astronaut’s face, removes exhaled carbon dioxide, and routes it through the life-support system for filtration and recirculation.
“The future of space exploration will not be built by any one entity alone, and our partnership with Prada is proof of that,” said Jonathan Cirtain, chief executive officer and president of Axiom Space. “By bringing together the best in both aerospace engineering as well as luxury craftsmanship and advanced product development, we have developed a garment that neither company could have created independently, and that is exactly the kind of cross-industry thinking that will define the next era of human spaceflight.”
Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group’s chief marketing officer and head of sustainability, said the collaboration drew upon the company’s expertise in design, patternmaking, and advanced materials.
According to Prada, the garment was developed using advanced 3D modeling techniques to maintain effective cooling and ventilation while enhancing comfort during spacewalks lasting up to eight hours.
“Every minute astronauts spend outside their vehicle, the LCVG is working to keep them safe,” said Russell Ralston, Axiom Space’s senior vice president of spacecraft development. “It manages their thermal environment, supports their breathing, and does it all while they’re pushing their bodies to the limit. The work we have done with Prada has taken that capability to a level we could not have achieved alone.”
The unveiling of the inner-layer garment follows the public debut of the AxEMU spacesuit’s outer layer at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan in 2024.
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