Axiom and Prada reveal cooling layer for Artemis IV moon suits

Axiom Space and Prada put the spotlight on fashion in New York, but the real story sat under the outer shell: the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment astronauts will wear inside the AxEMU suit. The base layer is built to move cold water through tubes across major muscle groups, keep crews comfortable during long lunar work, and backstop the system with a fully redundant cooling circuit if the primary loop fails. Axiom said the garment is designed for repeated use and can support spacewalks lasting up to eight hours.

The reveal sharpened the commercial side of a space program that now depends on private industry for hardware once handled entirely inside government programs. Axiom said the garment was developed with Prada’s expertise in engineered knitting, advanced materials, and 3D modeling, a pairing meant to blend technical performance with the precision of luxury manufacturing. The company’s first Artemis task order, awarded in 2022, was valued at $228 million, underscoring how deeply the partnership is tied to NASA’s return-to-the-Moon effort.

NASA currently lists Artemis IV as an early 2028 crewed surface landing mission. The flight is expected to carry four astronauts into lunar orbit, with two of them descending to the lunar South Pole region for about a week before returning to orbit and then heading back to Earth. NASA says Artemis is part of a broader push to establish a sustained lunar presence on and around the Moon, turning each suit component into a matter of mission reliability rather than image alone.

The June 7 unveiling in New York followed Axiom and Prada’s earlier public debut of the AxEMU outer-layer flight design in October 2024 at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan. That earlier reveal centered on the white outer shell that Prada said would protect astronauts from lunar heat and dust during NASA’s Artemis III mission, and Prada said the collaboration would continue beyond that first milestone. The new cooling layer makes clear that the partnership is moving from showpiece presentation to the less visible engineering that will have to function in the Moon’s harsh environment.

Axiom and Prada framed the project as an example of cross-industry cooperation, with company leaders presenting it as a model for how lunar exploration is being built now: not by one institution alone, but by a network of aerospace contractors, designers, and NASA planners preparing for the next phase of human operations on the Moon.