Touch typing astonauts
The final frontier
NASA is considering plans to integrate haptic vibro feedback and Halting State style air-writing accelerometer capability into spacesuit gloves. The news came this week as the space agency announced candidates selected for its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) pork handouts. Among the successful applicants was Virginia …
Still works at that altitude - the issue is that they are in freefall.
But actually someone else has pointed out that it's not "up" that is needed, but acceleration of the fingers. If you are just doing acceleration based measurements then you need to be pretty sophisticated, I'd go for some sort of visual tracking hybrid else the haptics will trigger the motion detectors, triggering the haptics....
PS - Yes I know you specified orbit, indicating more understanding than most of the population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_%28short_story%29
If hands and arms are wrapped in haptic machinery, they don't need actually to be in space suit arms and gloves.
Then again, maybe they don't need to be in space at all. We could put remote-control android bodies in space and have them operated from the ground.
Oops! I just killed the manned space programme.