RE: Interesting (ra1)
Mind you, these are some tech writers, so we should probably cut them a little slack when they get the wording imperfect on an aerospace story.
The moon does have an extremely tenuous atmosphere, mostly outgassing from the surface material attracted by the Moon's weak gravity. It is close enough to vacuum that unless you have a very precision instrument you cannot even tell it is there. Worse yet, it's held weakly enough to get blown off by the "solar wind," the stream of faint, but high-energy particles constantly being thrown off by the sun. The Earth (as well as the ISS in low-orbit) is protected from the solar wind by its magnetic field. The Moon (and anyone on it) is not nearly so lucky.
I think that the solar wind exposure, combined with omnipresent lunar dust is more of the "harsh atmosphere" problem with which the suit designers are trying to deal. As dangerous as the radiation (solar, cosmic, etc.) exposure is, the dust is a real problem, because it's effectively glass ground to the consistency of baby-powder: super-fine and super-abrasive. Our Apollo astronauts used to come into the landers with dusty suits and ended up looking like space-age coal miners as the dust got into everything (no word on pneumosilicosis or other such health issues, but then their exposure was very temporary, as opposed to workers on a permanent lunar base as is (was?) being planned by NASA). Keeping the dust out of the vehicles and, more importantly, preventing it from damaging seals and other moving parts is going to be a significant challenge.
One interesting answer to the problem that NASA has come up with is designing a presurized lunar rover where the EVA suit "docks" with the back of rover, such that you only ever loose a tiny amount of air between the suit and the hatch (instead of Apollo's idea of dumping all of the air out of the lander and walking out the door) and you never take the suit inside. While this is good for not wasting air or getting any dust inside the rover / lander, now you have the problem that you have to design the suit for constant, not temporary exposure to the lunar environment. This is not an easy problem.
