Space and Physics
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SpaceX has unveiled its new Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Suit, an important development in commercial space flight. The suit is very different from what we are used to seeing from NASA and Roscosmos. It’s a lot less bulky and it is designed with flexibility and comfort in mind.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The design is based on (so very similar to) the SpaceX Intravehicular Activity (IVA) suit that astronauts and cosmonauts wear when traveling to the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule. The new suit works both in pressurized and unpressurized environments and has new enhancements and redundancy to improve reliability during the spacewalk. An umbilical will provide life support for these suits, making them less mobile than the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, used on the ISS.
The suit is designed with scalability in mind. The different components can be produced and put together for people of different body types, so as to not repeat the canceled first historical spacewalk of two women because NASA didn’t have the right size spacesuits available.
The test of these spacesuits is coming sooner rather than later. They will be tested by the first mission of the Polaris Program, called Polaris Dawn. A Dragon capsule will fly to an orbit of 700 kilometers (435 miles) above the Earth. The date for this mission has not been announced yet, but it won’t be before this summer.
This will be the first commercial spacewalk and it will also be the first time four people conduct a spacewalk at the same time. The capsule has no airlock so the whole capsule will be depressurized, so the entire crew might as well get out there and see what’s what.
The mission will take a crew higher than other private missions have gone, passing temporarily through the radiation bands known as the Van Allen belts. Over five days, the team will conduct science experiments to better understand the effects of space travel on human physiology.
They will also be the first crew to test Starlink laser-based communications in space. SpaceX envisions this to be an important technology development for the future of deep space communications, around Earth, the Moon, and even Mars. NASA has been testing this type of communication as well, sending messages from beyond the orbit of the Red Planet.
SpaceX sees these suits as crucial to the plans to have millions of people on the Moon and Mars in the future – but we have recently seen that that goal is not as easy as it has been claimed to be.
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