Martian Mach 16 Jacket

There’s a strong argument to be made that the Martian Mach 16 Jacket isn’t just made out of the single most high performance material in our solar system – but that it’s quite possibly the single most important material in human history so far. So here goes…

We’ll start by pointing out the obvious – this material wasn’t created to build clothes. It started life as hypersonic deep space parachute designed to land a multi-billion dollar mission a billion miles away in the outer solar system – on a moon shrouded in methane monsoons, and covered in cryovolcanoes spewing out jets of −179°C hydrocarbon rain… So it’s just a couple of levels of performance up from your average umbrella.

To put a billion miles in perspective, the space-junk we left on the moon is only about 240,000 miles away. A billion miles is also 1,300 times further away than the James Webb Telescope. And over five million times further from Earth than the International Station.

It wasn’t done yet though. Because over a decade later, it was brought out of retirement to land the Perseverance Rover on Mars – the other place where humans are trying to get a foot on the property ladder. On 18 February 2021, as the Rover was heading towards Mars at 20,000kmph, or Mach 16, the parachute was put to work again. This time it was given just over a second to slow the Rover down to 320kmph in a −60°C Martian dust storm.

Now braking instantaneously at Mach 16 is not easy. For reference Tom Cruise was flying a lot slower than that in the last Top Gun as he used Earth’s atmosphere as a one man racetrack – hitting a conservative Mach 10. And if he’d braked to a stop in just over a second he’d have turned into soup. This braking strength is even more astonishing given how light the material is. The entire 21 metre wide parachute was packed into a nose cone about the size of the average backpack.

Today you’ll find Perseverance still happily trundling around Mars, and the parachute in a slightly untidy, dusty heap in the Jezero Crater. So if you, your kids, or your grandchildren, end up on these planets, sipping a coffee watching the Earth rise, we’ll have this material to thank. It helped give the world today a window into the worlds of tomorrow.

As the Space Race started heating up in the late 1950s NASA built its first spacesuits for Project Mercury – the first space flight program aiming to send a human into orbit. The natural, untreated parachute material has a subtle metallic shine that captures the super functionality and space-age glamour of the Mercury program’s suits. Black contrast seam taping and super strong zigzag stitching reference the aluminised nylon and angled zippers of those early spacesuits. And it also has a transparent finish which reveals the jacket’s complex material engineering.

As you’d imagine, a material that can survive methane monsoons, cryogenic cold, Martian dust storms, hydrocarbon rain, cryovolcanoes and hypersonic braking, also makes a pretty miraculous jacket here on Earth.  

The high-tenacity, heat-proof nylon used to land the Cassini-Huygens Probe on Titan and the Perseverance Rover on Mars took 15 years to develop. It’s spun at high speed to maximise strength, tightly woven to control airflow, then washed, coloured and processed with specialist low-porosity and heat-resistant finishes so it deploys cleanly and behaves predictably in thin, dusty air. Before launch it's baked at 275°F to kill any microorganisms that might contaminate other worlds. They are the lightest, strongest and most temperature-resistant parachute fabrics ever produced.

Built to be worn in any season, the Martian Mach 16 Jacket is the shorter-cut, lighter weight cousin to the Martian Aerogel Jacket. The cuffs tighten with metal snaps to create a seal around your wrists, while the hem can be tightened with cord adjusters to prevent cold air from getting in at your waist. All seams on the jacket are fully taped and bound. On the side of the jacket you’ll find two large pockets that close with metal snaps. Pocket bags are French-seamed and stitched flat to the inner front panel. And the two-way front zipper comes fitted with an oversized pull cord so it’s easy to grab in space gloves.

The Martian Mach 16 Jacket is made from the only material you’ll find on Earth, Titan and Mars. On Mars, the canopy and backshell are still sitting on the surface a few kilometres from the Rover’s landing site in the Jezero Crater. Photographed in situ by both the Rover and the Ingenuity helicopter, you can clearly see the fabric spread across the ground, suspension lines still visible, the backshell lying beside it. And two binary messages are still encoded into the canopy. One is the GPS coordinates of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The other is a Teddy Roosevelt quote, that simply says “Dare Mighty Things.”