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This article first appeared on Vogue Business.
If you were lucky enough to land on the moon, you’d be pretty keen to catch sight of your surroundings. But the UV radiation and lunar dust on the moon’s surface make this much easier said than done. Sports performance eyewear brand Oakley has been tasked with the solution.
“When we’ve been on orbital missions, which is all humans have done since 1972, we’ve been trained to put our visors down before the sun goes up, and raise them when it goes down,” Michael Lopez-Alegria, Axiom’s Chief Astronaut, tells Vogue Business in an interview.
“That happens every 45 minutes when you’re going around the Earth, and if you forget to put the visor down at sun-up, you’ll be quickly reminded: the sun is absolutely blazing in space, it is the widest, brightest light you can imagine.”
Protecting astronauts like Lopez-Alegria from the moon’s visually complex and hostile conditions requires intricate optical design, and Oakley has been chosen to design the eye protection for the next humans to land on the moon. In 2027, when astronauts take off for the Artemis III mission — the first human lunar landing since Apollo 17 back in 1972 — they’ll wear a space visor co-designed by Oakley and its official partner, Axiom Space.
“The sun is absolutely blazing in space, it is the widest brightest light you can imagine.”
Michael Lopez-Alegria, Chief Astronaut at Axiom.
“If you think of when you’re in bright sunlight, everything that is in shadow seems even darker, because your eyes are adjusting to the brightness,” Lopez-Alegria says. “Oakley’s specialism is making sunglasses that can maintain visual acuity even in bright sunlight, so they were the ideal partner to design the performance coating of the space visor to help us with these transitions.”
Artemis III’s crew will be looking more fashion-forward than ever when they set off for the moon, because this visor will also be paired with a spacesuit that Prada has co-designed with Axiom.
“We’re really in a new kind of commercial era for space.”
Russell Ralston, Executive Vice President of Axiom’s Program Management and Engineering.
“The aesthetics of the suit is not something that’s often been thought about very much in the past, and certainly a lot of the engineering design starts first and foremost with the technical,” Russell Ralston, Executive Vice President of Axiom’s Program Management and Engineering, tells Vogue Business.
“But we chose to take a perspective that it doesn’t have to be or, it can be an and — we can have a suit that is safe and high performing and optimised for the requirements of the mission, and, at the same time, be aesthetically pleasing.
“We hope it’s inspiring to the next generation of space explorers, because we’re really in a new kind of commercial era for space,” Ralston adds.