In a dorm room-sized office near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a lanky man in an inflated spacesuit dances. He hops, shimmies and boogies. He stretches his arms, sweeps his hands over his head, twists his torso and lifts a bent leg in the air. At one point he lurches over, as if to scoop up a rock on Mars.

The guy in the spacesuit is artist and designer Ted Southern. Videotaping his performance is Nikolay Moiseev, a Russian mechanical engineer and Southern’s partner in founding Final Frontier Design, a startup company that hopes to craft affordable yet highly capable spacesuits for a burgeoning commerical spaceflight industry.