Certifying an Adaptive Intra-Vehicular Activity Suit for Suborbital Spaceflight: A Physiology-Integrated Framework

This paper proposes a physiology-integrated certification framework for adaptive Intra-Vehicular Activity (IVA) suits designed for commercial suborbital spaceflight. The study introduces a five-phase qualification framework encompassing design and documentation review, component and material qualification, environmental and system testing, human-in-the-loop evaluation, and flight-like integrated validation. The proposed framework is applied to an adaptive IVA suit architecture integrating embedded soft sensors, physiological monitoring, a predictive digital-twin engine, and adaptive actuation systems. It also examines system requirements, safety interlocks, software assurance, failure modes, and certification considerations. Analytical simulations of rapid depressurization and thermal excursion scenarios are used to investigate the influence of actuation delay and controller trigger settings on suit performance. This work presents a conceptual design and certification-planning framework. The proposed system has not yet been validated through physical hardware testing, and numerical results are based on modelling assumptions and design targets.