Have spacesuit will travel

New Scientist SPACE - Future spacesuits could heal themselves

The spacesuit would be self-healing because its innermost layer, which provides the spacesuit's airtight seal, is filled with a thick polymer gel. The rubber-like gel is sandwiched between two thin layers of polyurethane so that if a hole forms in these layers, the gel oozes from surrounding areas to plug it. In vacuum chamber tests, the gel healed punctures up to 2 millimetres wide.

Cool.

One other problem for new lunar spacesuits: accounts of the Apollo missions made it clear that a significant problem was the amount of moon dirt that stuck to the suits and got dragged into the Lunar Module. From another article:

The moonwalkers of the 1960s struggled with the fine, powdery dust that covered their spacesuits. Back inside their tiny one-room cabin, it got everywhere-in the machinery, in their eyes, in their throats.

Scott said that moon dust even got in the connectors between the backpack and the spacesuits."You could almost hear them grind after three days," he said. He ranks dust as "the major problem for a long stay."

I assume that for a habitat on the Moon, they will have to devise some decent way of getting fine dirt off the suits so it is not dragged in through the airlock. (The Apollo lunar module did not have an airlock at all, which was a major problem. ) But even with an airlock, seems to me there will still be a problem unless you can use some fluid or cleaning device of some kind to use. Would a really efficient vacuum cleaner work?

UPDATE: by co-incidence, I just found this snippet about the Apollo spacesuits in a Tech Central Station article (it's a review of a book for kids about the Apollo program):

A central theme of Team Moon is that a large number of people -- the 400,000 of the subtitle -- pooled their talents to make the mission happen. These included, for instance, the seamstresses of the spacesuits worn by the astronauts. The suits consisted of 22 layers of materials such as Mylar and neoprene-coated nylon that were stitched and glued together by a team at the company ILC Dover. Team members had a great deal of confidence in the extensively tested suits, but still felt pangs of worry when, as recalled by seamstress Eleanor Foracker, "the guys on the moon started jumping up and down."