You think your moisture-wicking gym gear is impressive? Cute. NASA astronauts heading to the Moon in 2028 will be wearing Prada-designed thermal underwear that literally pumps cold water through tubes to keep them alive. Fashion has never been more life-or-death.
According to The Verge, Axiom Space has just revealed the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) - the high-tech base layer that will sit underneath the already-flashy Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit developed in collaboration with the Italian luxury house. If you thought the outer suit was the main event, think again. The LCVG is the unsung hero doing all the actual hard work.
So what does space underwear actually do?
The LCVG is essentially a full-body cooling system. Cold water circulates through tubes embedded directly into the garment, pulling heat away from the astronaut's body during spacewalks and while suited up inside the AxEMU. Without it, the heat generated by a human body working hard in a sealed suit would turn the whole experience into a very expensive sauna session. On the Moon. Which would be bad.
This is the kind of engineering problem that sounds boring until you realise the solution involves stitching a plumbing network into something you wear on your body. Then it immediately becomes the coolest thing you've ever heard of.
Why Prada, though?
The Prada partnership isn't just a marketing stunt - though it is obviously also a marketing stunt. The Italian brand brings serious materials expertise to the table, and luxury fashion houses have long worked with technical fabrics that push performance boundaries. Applying that craftsmanship to something that has to function in the vacuum of space and the brutal temperature swings of the lunar surface is a genuinely interesting use of that knowledge.
Still, there is something deeply funny about the fact that when humanity returns to the Moon as part of the Artemis IV mission, the astronauts will be wearing a luxury brand's thermal long johns underneath their luxury brand spacesuit. The Moon landing gift shop is going to be something else.
The bigger picture
The Artemis IV mission is targeting 2028, and the combination of the AxEMU outer suit and the LCVG underneath represents a new generation of lunar gear - more flexible, more functional, and apparently more fashion-forward than anything the Apollo era produced. Whether the Prada logo ends up anywhere visible is, tragically, not yet confirmed.
But somewhere in Milan, a designer has "contributed to lunar exploration" on their CV, and honestly, respect.
