Space Suit Riot
SpaceX has shown off a futuristic-looking new extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuit designed to allow space tourists to venture outside of the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft in orbit — and it’s decked out in the latest cutting-edge tech.
The suit will make its first appearance during this summer’s Polaris Dawn mission, which will see a crew of four space tourists stepping out of the capsule to go for a spacewalk.
The suit is astonishingly slim compared to the bulky suits we’ve become accustomed to that allow astronauts to venture outside spacecraft like the International Space Station.
The EVA suit’s helmet is made of 3D-printed parts and a visor.
It also features a new Heads-Up Display (HUD) and camera that allow astronauts to keep track of the suit’s pressure, temperature, and relative humidity without having to glance down at their wrists or take their gaze away from the Earth below. It can also show a mission clock to gauge the duration of various EVA tasks.
In short, the suit’s features inject some much-needed 21st-century tech into an area of space exploration that hasn’t changed much since the Apollo days over half a century ago.
HUD Mouth
There’s a lot we still don’t know about the suit or how the HUD functions. The EVA suit does look strikingly like the company’s Intravehicular Activity (IVA) suit, which astronauts have been donning since the first crewed launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft four years ago.
“Aesthetically, it may look similar to the IVA, but what they did under the hood is extraordinary,” Polaris Dawn commander Jared Isaacman said during a discussion on X-formerly-Twitter, as quoted by Space.com.
A video (embedded above) of the new suit shows a surprisingly high degree of mobility at the shoulders. Spiral zippers allow it to be put on and taken off relatively easily. The boots were also constructed from materials borrowed from SpaceX’s Falcon rocket interstage.
However, instead of having life support built-in, space tourists will rely on an umbilical for life support, which could explain the suit’s slimmed-down design.
SpaceX has already made considerable changes to the tech that allows us to venture out into space. Case in point, the cabin of its Crew Dragon, which is built around two large touchscreens, looks unrecognizable compared to the interior of Russia’s cramped Soyuz capsule.
Its EVA suits are no different, pushing the boundaries of what space exploration could — and arguably should — look like in the year 2024.
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Source Agencies
