Gary L. Harris

Gary L. Harris is author of the “The Origins and Technology of the Advanced Extravehicular Space Suit and this program will be about spacesuit designs, functions, and applications. Mr. Harris worked with the Ocean Corp of Houston, Texas (Undersea Life Support and Technical Program) and began his space-related career with the U.S. Army working in the Nike Hercules missile system and in Sprint-Spartan (also called Safeguard) missile system development. In the late 1970s he worked as a commercial diver and undersea technician in the world's offshore oil-fields. In the early 1990s he working for Lee Weaver, the owner of Weaver Aerospace inc., on experimental pressure suit programs for aviation and space applications. While with Weaver he designed and built two experimental prototype extra-vehicular space suits for orbital applications, performed cryogenic (liquid oxygen) research for Allied Signal and Lockheed and built mock-ups for an escape capsule for the manned Roton Rocket Vehicle. Mr. Harris now works with Pablo de Leon of De Leon Technologies LLC. Pablo, who has a masters degree in Aerospace sciences and is a visionary in the mold of Lee Weaver, had been working for about 15 years on pressure suit and life support technologies for Argentine civilian and military applications. Together they research pressure suits and bio-chemical suit technologies. Presently we are working with the University of North Dakota's Space Studies Department and their graduate students performing research on EVA space suits for the moon and Mars under a NASA grant.