The Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit: From Concept to International Space Station" with our guest speaker, Dr James Waldie.

The brainchild of Australian aerospace engineer, Dr James Waldie, the Skinsuit has been worn by an astronaut inside the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time. Denmark’s first astronaut, Andreas Mogensen, spent 10 days aboard the ISS in September 2015 and pulled on the Skinsuit to test its effectiveness in the weightless conditions.

Inspired by the striking bodysuit worn by Cathy Freeman at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Dr Waldie and his collaborators have spent more than 15 years getting the suit into space.

Skin-tight and made of bi-directional elastics, the Skinsuit has been designed to mimic the impact of gravity on the body to reduce the debilitating physical effects space flights have on astronauts’ bodies.


Dr James Waldie
Aerospace Engineer at BAE Systems

Dr James Waldie (MIEAust CPEng) graduated in 1999 with a Bachelor of Engineering (Aerospace) and Bachelor of Business (Administration) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). He continued on as a Research Scholar at the University of California in San Diego for his Masters, and earned his PhD from RMIT in 2005, working on skinsuits for extra- and intra-vehicular activity.

He has worked for BAE Systems since 2002, initially designing several UAVs and operating them around Australia, and attending the International Space University Summer Session in 2004.

In 2007 he was selected as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked principally on skinsuits as physical deconditioning countermeasures until 2010. Returning to BAE Systems in Australia, he has since been a Research and Technology Lead at BAE. He has also become a Senior Associate at RMIT, serving as a Principal Investigator for the ESA-led Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit (GLCS) programme.

Dr Waldie is on the Executive of the Mars Society Australia and has also been a Project Lead for the Society since 2001, developing skinsuits for analogue trials in Australia and in the U.S.