Spray-on spacesuits?

MSNBC.com science editor Alan Boyle offers a glimpse inside the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, the little-known agency charged with exploring crazy ideas that might bolster space exploration:

You don't hear about the 6-year-old Atlanta-based institute as much as you do about space shuttles or Mars probes. But across the country, NIAC's research fellows are churning away on crazy ideas that could become positively ho-hum in decades to come.

This week, NIAC's leaders and research fellows met in Seattle to review some of those crazy ideas: skin-tight spray-on spacesuits for a trip to Mars ... static-electricity fields that would protect future lunar bases from space radiation ... even a lunar lab that could develop microbes for terraforming Mars.