It's sleek. It's chic. It's very, very, very tight. All the better to show an astronaut's gravity-defying figure back on earth.

Introducing the BioSuit: a prototype spacesuit recently completed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When the white high-tech design is finalized in a few years, it will be the first new look for astronauts in more than four decades, replacing the lumpy, awkward 300-pound outfit with something worthy of a super hero.

"The current spacesuit dates back to Apollo," said Robert Cassanova, director of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, which partially funded the work. "It's a gas-pressurized bag that provides the atmospheric pressure humans need to survive, but they're heavy and bulky." The Michelin-man-like outfit is also exhausting -- about 70 percent of the energy astronauts expend is spent wearing the suit.



On the other hand, the BioSuit, made of nylon, Spandex, and a shape memory polymer, looks like a full- body ACE bandage. And feels like one, too.

"It's definitely very tight," said Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and engineering systems at MIT who has been working on the suit for seven years. "But it's amazing how adaptable we are -- I can wear it for three or four hours and I'm fine."

The BioSuit even works like an ACE bandage, wrapping layers around the body to allow movement while maintaining the pressure needed to combat the vacuum of space. The suit also includes a sort of "skeleton" -- a stiff material that provides support without limiting mobility.

The suit is of growing importance under President Bush's plans to send humans back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. Current outfits -- though suitable for short spacewalks outside the International Space Station, where gravity is almost nonexistent -- are far too awkward for the surface of the moon or Mars where astronauts will need greater mobility, Newman said.

The new suit should work quite well for loping across the ground -- and even allow the astronauts to "be on their hands and knees and crawling," she said.

Newman also hopes that the suit, developed with Jeffrey Hoffman, a fellow MIT professor, and a former astronaut, among others could be used to help astronauts from losing muscle strength in space by adjusting the tension of the wrappings and using the suit as an exercise tool.

"I think there could be medical and athletic applications here on Earth, too," Newman said.

So far, the prototype of the suit is complete, but two challenges must be resolved before it can be used: Wrinkles that occur along the joints, particularly the elbows and knees, need to be eliminated to allow the pressure of the suit to remain constant.

That pressure is the second concern. Because humans are used to living with a certain amount of pressure from the atmosphere, the suit has to provide that as well. The current bulky suit allows for 25 kilopascals (a unit of pressure), but Newman wants her suit to reach 30 kPa, about one-third of the pressure exerted by Earth's atmosphere. Sometimes it gets there, but not consistently.

But she's got some time to work out the kinks. When the NASA institute first proposed the suit, officials said they wanted something that could be ready in a decade. That was seven years and around $500,000 in funding ago.

"This is something that could be realized in the near future," Newman said.