The current state of spacesuit development represents an enormous risk to all future development of crewed space operations. Gas bladder spacesuits are stuck on a narrow slice of the pressure range. Lower pressures improve mobility at the expense of wasting time acclimatizing the body to 4.3psi at 100% O2. Higher suit pressures don't require as extensive of a pre-breathe, but vastly increase exertion required by astronauts while on EVA. With gas-pressurized suits, you can choose any tradeoff point between these two, but you can't get both. As long as an astronaut's breathing gas is also their compression source, spacesuits will never be able to move beyond this linear tradeoff.

Mechanical counterpressure systems allow us to avoid making this tradeoff. We can provide a standard O2+N mix at a standard pressure, then apply counterpressure directly to the skin of the astronaut. With traditional woven manufacturing methods, this is impossible. Fortunately, with a fabric that is inelastic, can be doubly curved for custom fit, and that can be selectively mechanically extensible (as opposed to solely relying on elastic deformation), this can be possible.

By separating these subsystems, we can simplify both dramatically, achieving mobility, cost, and operations goals that would otherwise be completely unobtainable.

While pilots have continued to evolve methods to withstand higher and higher G loads, modern anti-G loading compression garment systems aren't able to provide enough compression in a controlled enough way to let our pilots extend their operational envelope.