Talk:Suitport

Suitport was a Natural sciences good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
November 29, 2008	Good article nominee	Not listed

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on June 21, 2008.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the problem of harmful lunar or planetary dust adhering to spacesuits and being brought inside spacecraft by astronauts could be eliminated by the use of suitports (pictured), patented in 1996?

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Suitport/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Hi, I'll be your GA reviewer. Okay, here's the conversation so far:

Hiya, Swpb. I review a lot of sci/tech articles, and I looked around Suitport. I lean more towards inclusionism than deletionism; on the other hand, my experience with engineering tells me that most ideas, including patented ideas, have more to do with getting funding than with creating an actual product, until and unless there's an actual product. The references currently on that page don't, in my mind, establish notability. Has anyone constructed a Suitport? Has it been proposed for any future NASA or other mission? I get that the idea makes sense, but I'd like to see some reliable secondary source say that the idea makes sense. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:56, 19 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I seem to remember hearing about a demonstration suitport that NASA had built, but I don't know if it was fully functional, and I can't find a reference for it. It has definitely been proposed by NASA for use in future programs, as evidenced by their inclusion of it in the illustrated rover concept. It shows up a fair amount in industry discussions of near-future architectures, as a "when" rather than an "if". Unfortunately, the best info I've seen on it came from conference presentations (International Conference on Environmental Systems, run by SAE), which aren't publicly available. I understand if the sourcing issue keeps the article short of "Good" status, I'll keep looking for sources that highlight the notability better. Thanks for your quick response. — Swpb^{τ • c} 00:53, 20 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, you never know what will float to the top of google when you give it a few months, and just after posting the above, I found an AIAA paper (or at least the first page of it) that seems to indicate NASA Ames was using a real suitport as early as 1995, which I've now added to the article. — Swpb^{τ • c} 01:11, 20 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think NASA Ames was using a real suitport. The relevant section from http://www.spacearchitect.org/pubs/AIAA-95-1062.pdf, unless I'm missing something, seems to be "Philip E. Culbertson, Jr., the lead designer for the Hazmat vehicle, is making progress in adapting the Suitport to it. The two Suitports will provide direct, rapid don/doff access to two protective suits. In the ideal concept ...". It continues "In the prototype ...", etc. Note the future tense and "ideal concept". This is how academic engineers and government-funded engineers often write; they use the present tense just as long as they can get away with it, as if they have an actual product, and it isn't til you get to the end of the paper that you find out they never built it. However, the ref says that another variant of the suit was built and flight-tested: "Griffin built a test suit flew it [sic] on the NASA-JSC KC-135 aircraft, in a simulated lunar gravity test. A photograph of the Griffin Design suit demonstrator on the KC-135 appears in Figure 7. Aviation Week and Space Technology described this test: 'The unit could plug into other vehicles, such as lunar rovers ...'". So we've got an actual prototype tested, plus several patents and several illustrations, so we've got enough for an article. The next question is whether we've got enough for a Good Article. The worst case would be that you have to fold this material into some related article in order to get enough for a Good Article, but I'm hopeful that you can pull information from other relevant articles in here and keep this as the GA; for instance, articles on lunar exploration, space suits or hazmat suits might be relevant. Keep on digging and see what you can find. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 04:17, 20 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So to be clear, you're looking for more breadth of information, not necessarily directly related to suitports? — Swpb^{τ • c} 19:16, 20 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've been following Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Cold_fusion/Evidence. The arbitrators may decide to rule on questions of whether certain government sources on science should be considered primary or secondary. If government-funded science is considered primary, then this Suitport article has no secondary sources other than the ones on moon dust, and in that case, I don't think it can be considered GA material. Can you find any source that isn't a patent and doesn't come from NASA that discusses suitports? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:46, 24 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep looking; I've put the article "on hold" until the weekend. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:03, 25 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I think we can't save this GA nomination at this time. Some of the material here might be suitable for a different article, as long as the article is based on secondary sources. The problem here was that this was based primarily on patents, and interpreting the meaning and significance of patents is prohibited here by our no original research policy. Even if we find a relevant secondary source, they may not say what we want them to say about the patents. From the first patent: "The hereinbefore given description was primarily related to a crew member performing the duties involved in hazardous or toxic material clean-up, the principles of the present invention related to an environment suit and to the suitlock docking mechanism are equally applicable to the crew member performing the duties on a space vehicle or space station." That is, it's describing something not originally designed to be a "suitport". The second patent is based on "and claims priority" based on a German patent from 2002. You've done some fine work here; it may be best to fold some of this material into some other article on some related subject. Best of luck. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 00:33, 29 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Info

A Japanese patent published on January 22nd, 1979 with a patent application #: 54-8297 used a suitport in conjunction with a radiation suit. I haven't been able to find this patent, I've only found a reference to it in Cohen's.

Hubert C. Vykukal filed a patent for an "Weightlessness simulation system" invention that used a suitport in October 1986. http://www.google.com/patents/US4678438

Earliest mention of the word "suitport" I could find was in April 1987.http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19870014631_1987014631.pdf

Marc M. Cohen filled a patent for a "Suitport extra-vehicular access facility" in October 1987. This seems to be the first patent to suggest to use a suitport with a spacesuit. http://www.google.com/patents/US4842224

--Craigboy (talk) 14:12, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48PVtI3lJGE&feature=plcp

Z-1 prototype spacesuit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d__xlXqYFZc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH93FSS8ZOQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tDuwIu_b9g

Dust can enter a vehicle through the suitport.

The suit of the suit port, when in the hazardous environment, comes into contact with that environment. When the suit is then attached to the vehicle port there is an interstitial volume between the hatch that seals the suit and the hatch that seals the vehicle. The whole system includes "a system for purging the interstitial volume between the regions sealed by said first, second, third and fourth seals".(patent description) The source of gas and vacuum used for purging the interstitial volume might not remove some bits of the hazardous environment from the back of the suit before the hatch in the vehicle is opened prior to opening the hatch on the back of the suit. What the suitport would do would be to reduce dust transported from the suit into the vehicle, not eliminate it. Further, there is no explanation of what is done with the purge gas or where dust carried away by the purge gas ends up. This is a good example of a case in which a primary source is not as good as a secondary source for information in Wikipedia. The patent description is hard for most Wikipedians to understand and is presented by a source biased to give the impression of an effective device. - Fartherred (talk) 04:32, 28 July 2013 (UTC) commas added - Fartherred (talk) 02:26, 3 August 2013 (UTC) - word "to" added, pardon me - Fartherred (talk) 15:04, 18 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You're missing the point: in normal usage, the interstitial volume never comes in contact with vehicle internal volume: when the suitport is not used, the suitport's back seal and the vehicle hatch remain coupled, keeping whatever dust could settle on the backpack trapped in the interstitial volume. Only when maintenance work on the suit's backpack is needed, the seal between the backpack and hatch is dehermetized and dust might enter the vehicle. Sharpfang (talk) 12:40, 15 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Sharpfang: No, Fartherred is right. The volume being discussed is not the one between the PLSS and the hatch cover, but rather a very small one between the various seals.

A suitport has four rings which seal to each other in various combinations. There is an "inner" pair which make up the suit and backpack, surrounded by an "outer" pair which make up the hatch. Each pair consists of an "inboard" part which opens to allow someone to enter the suit, and an "outboard" part which is less movable. Specifically, they are:

Outer outboard ring: Bulkhead hatch ring. Seals to suit ring (#4) when suit is docked.
Outer inboard ring: Hatch cover ring. Seals to preceding when the hatch is closed.
Inner inboard ring: Life support backpack ring. Seals to preceding when suit is docked.
Inner outboard ring: Suit ring. Seals to preceding when suit is closed.

These may, in a simple mental model, be thought of as arranged in a square, which comes apart either horizontally or vertically. There is a small +-shaped volume in the middle of that square which communicates between the outside and inside each time the suitport is cycled. While the gaps can be made quite tight, they cannot be eliminated.

The patent Fartherred is citing is about applying the suitport concept to hazmat cleanup, and some materials are much more hazardous than dust, so this small volume may be of concern. 92.119.17.10 (talk) 21:32, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, if we're talking about the (minuscule) surfaces between the inboard and outboard rings, it's true even that little can cause serious problems in severely toxic environment or in presence of microbial contaminants. I'm looking mainly at space applications where this isn't such a problem - the small amounts of exposed dust will be entirely harmless, and my point stands, that bulk of it (on the back of the suit as mentioned by Fartherred) remains safely sealed in the volume between the hatch and the life support backpack. Sharpfang (talk) 22:16, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To editors Fartherred, Sharpfang and 92.119.17.10: This seems like an important subtlety to mention in the article, if it can be well sourced. Thanks for looking into it! —swpb^{T • go beyond • bad idea} 19:12, 16 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]