There’s a pained look on Dillon Hall’s face behind the space suit’s closed mask. The bulky gear he’s wearing from head to toe weighs 125 pounds. It’s a prototype of what NASA astronauts will don on the moon, which has one-sixth the gravity of Earth. Up there he could easily bounce along the dusty lunar surface. Down here, at Axiom Space’s headquarters in Houston, he relies on a long stick and the helping hands of his fellow engineers just to stay upright.

NASA awarded Axiom a $1.26 billion contract to make the suits for the agency’s Artemis program , which aims to return Americans to the moon for the first time since the last of the historic Apollo landings , in 1972. That’s expected to happen starting with the Artemis III mission, as soon as mid-2027.

While NASA will have paid for

See Full Page