Students Shoot for NASA Space Missions with ‘Mutant’ Seam Design

While many dream of going to space, a team of college students may one day have a design of theirs used in orbit.

A quartet of undergraduates from Texas Christian University won the 2025 Best Innovation Award in the Technology Collaboration Wearables Workshop and University Challenge at NASA’s Johnson Space Center last month. The competition in Houston was held during NASA’s Spaceflight Human Optimization Conference 

The students set out to create flexible understated seams that prevented lunar dust from permeating as part of their project “Optimized Suit Environmental Protection Garment Seams.” Two fashion merchandising students Adelaide Lovett and Suzanna Tesfamicheal joined forces with two biochemistry students Daisy Li and Amarige Yusufji. Initial attempts created a seam that was too bulky so Lovett tried folding it differently, which led to the final result. Three types of seams were tested — French, flat-felled and a custom-engineered “mutant” seam — using different fabrics and threads. While a flat-felled seam — like one found on a pair of jeans — can be seen from the outside, the mutant seam was folded inward so that the extra material is encased inside of the garment.  

TCU fashion merchandising professor Leslie Browning-Samoni, who steered the undergrads through the research and development, said, “The reason that we did that was when the extra material is on the outside, that can collect more dust.”

Felix Arwen, a softgoods engineering technologist at NASA, mentored the students. Browning-Samoni helped the team to standardize the seam construction, stitch length, needle type and other elements of the process.

Early prototypes were made with such high-performance fabrics as Kevlar, Teflon and polyurethane-coated textiles that were sewn with either polyester or nylon thread. “In order to understand if the seams repelled or mitigated dust penetration, we needed to test it. The students came up with the way to test it to determine how much dust went through,” Browning-Samoni said.

Unable to get actual lunar dust, the team bought lunar regolith simulant, a terrestrial material that is synthesized to approximate the chemical, mechanical, mineralogical and other properties of lunar dust. That was then used in a rock tumbler in an hours-long process, Browning-Samoni said. The seams were first sewn into little pouches that were weighed before and after the tumbling to see how much the weight changed, which was an indication of how much dust was permeating the seam. Afterward, the penetration of the materials was examined under Keyence Microscopes, and then photographed to see what had happened at a micro-level, she added,

Explaining how lunar dust is hazardous, abrasive, and sticky, Browing-Samoni said after space walks, astronauts do not want any particles to get into their spacecrafts to avoid damaging equipment.

Whether the mutant seam will ever be used by NASA for future space missions remains to be seen. Acknowledging a media request inquiring about the possibility of that, a NASA spokesperson said the appropriate Johnson Space Center contact is unavailable until Monday.

NASA is teaming up with Axiom Space to provide next-generation spacesuits for the agency’s expanded mission portfolio including its Moon Surface Mission. For 50-plus years, NASA astronauts have performed spacewalks outside of the International Space Station for maintenance and upgrading purposes, while wearing the Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit. That design was created for the Space Shuttle Program in the 1980s — long past its intended design shelf life. With more advanced spacewalking and more complex exploration goals on tap, the new suits are meant to act as “personal spaceships” for the astronauts, according to NASA’s site. Implementing cutting-edge technologies such as ones that improve the wearer’s mobility and enhance life support systems are part of the aim.

For the Blue Origin space flight that Lauren Sanchez was part of in April, she partnered with Monse’s Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia to create custom suits. For that 11-minute excursion, Jeff Bezos’ now wife was joined by pop star Katy Perry, CBS’ Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn and scientists Amanda Nguyen and Aisha Bowe.

Other designers and brands have used spacesuits in more novel ways. In 1969, Pierre Cardin was so intrigued by space travel that he visited NASA headquarters and tried on an Apollo 11 spacesuit. Decades later, during John Galliano’s Dior years, he donned a space suit for the end of the house’s fall 2006 show. And even the snowboard brand Burton used space suits for design inspiration for U.S. Olympians’ uniforms on the mountain.

Open to incorporating other applications of the mutant seam in other ways, the team is open to exploring how it might help to prevent other chemicals and particles from penetrating PPE apparel or gear. Using such seams for added protection for workers, who spray fields with pesticides, is being explored, Browning-Samoni said. “We don’t want to just use it for one area. We want to see where else it could be applicable.”

She and a TCU colleague Charles Freeman, who also worked with the students on the project, are members of NC170: Personal Protective Technologies for Current and Emerging Occupational and Environmental Hazards, a research group comprised of 16 colleges and universities that aims to assess and improve PPE and protective clothing. Browning-Samoni said, “Based on the mitigation aspect of the seam it could have great potential in this realm.”

In order to win the innovation award, the TCU team had to deliver a formal pitch to NASA judges and present their work during an interactive session with conference attendees. Their exhibit featured a scientific poster, seam samples, a slideshow and microscope imagery of the dust-impacted materials. Their excursion wrapped up with a tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, including its Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility, where space flight crews train. They also stopped by their mentor Arwen’s lab to check out some real-time innovations that are being developed in astronautics. Like the students, Arwen had participated in the challenge years ago, when he was an undergraduate.