SpaceX’s next launch of private astronauts is scheduled for this summer, and a major component critical to its success has finally been revealed.
The mission, Polaris Dawn, is set to include the first extravehicular activity (EVA) missions to be flown by private astronauts, meaning SpaceX had to build its own spacesuit capable of protecting its wearers from the harsh environment of space. Now we’ve finally got our first look at the design.
The new suit was unveiled on SpaceX’s website and social media channels on Saturday (May 4). The announcement was accompanied this afternoon by a “spaces” discussion with SpaceX engineers and Polaris Dawn crew members at X, formerly Twitter, which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk purchased in 2022.
Connected: The Polaris Dawn crew prepares for the world’s first private spacewalk with SpaceX
SpaceX’s EVA suit looks a lot like the company’s IVA (intravehicular activity) suit, which is designed to be worn in spacecraft during launches and landings, but not in the vacuum of space. The new EVA suits contain material and joint enhancements aimed at increasing astronauts’ mobility while protecting them from the cold, airless void outside their spacecraft.
“There was a lot of work on both the materials of the suit – developing a whole new layer that we had to add for thermal management – and looking at the thermal condition of the crew members themselves and making sure they were at a comfortable temperature inside the suit,” said SpaceX spacesuit team manager Chris Drake during the X discussion.
The suits also incorporate technology used in other parts of SpaceX’s production line. “We have a lot of different resources at our disposal here,” Drake said. “There’s some thermal material that we ended up using on the boot that was actually developed for the Falcon and Dragon and is used on the intermediate stage of the Falcon and on the trunk of the Dragon.”
The SpaceX Extravehicular Activity (EVA) suit → https://t.co/z2Z9iVpt6x #Maythe4thBeWithYou pic.twitter.com/peETlLCcDPMay 4, 2024
Drake also described a new heads-up display in the helmet design, allowing astronauts to view data on the internal temperature, humidity and pressure of their suits; the display also shows a mission clock to monitor the duration of certain EVA tasks. “Aesthetically, it may look similar to IVA, but what they’ve done under the hood is amazing,” Jared Isaacman, mission commander for Polaris Dawn, said during the discussion. In collaboration with SpaceX, Isaacman is also funding the mission.
The billionaire previously funded and commanded SpaceX’s 2021 commercial Inspiration4 mission, which was the first all-civilian space flight. For Inspiration4, in addition to the in-flight research, Isaacman was motivated to charter the flight in an effort to raise money for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Polaris Dawn, the first of three possible missions for Isaacman’s Polaris program, also raises money for St. Jude’s and aims to take human spaceflight to a new level. “The Polaris program envisions up to three missions,” Isaacman said Saturday, “culminating in the first manned Starship flight.”
Connected: Meet the four private Polaris Dawn astronauts that SpaceX will launch into orbit this year
Isaacman will be joined aboard Polaris Dawn by retired United States Air Force Lt. Col. Scott “Kid” Poteet, who will serve as the mission’s pilot, and mission specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both lead operations engineers at SpaceX. The quartet hopes to push the boundaries of space travel with this flight, which will take them higher than any human has flown since the last Apollo moon landing mission more than 50 years ago.
Menon described the flight profile and mission timeline during the May 4 talk on X:
“Essentially, we’re going to launch into a highly elliptical orbit where our perigee is about 190 kilometers but our apogee is about 1,200 kilometers. Then, after a number of orbits, we will raise our apogee to about 1,400 kilometers… The benefit of being at this high altitude is that we can better understand the effects of this environment – this higher radiation environment, for example – both on the human body… and on the spacecraft, after a number of orbits there, we’ll finish all the research we intended to do, and then we’ll drop our apogee back down to a nice inertial orbit around 700 kilometers, where we’ll perform the rest of our mission objectives, including the spacewalk.”
Polaris Dawn will last five days, during which time the crew plans to complete up to 40 experiments. For example, the team intends to take X-ray images of radiation in the Van Allen belts — ring-shaped areas of energetic particles around Earth — to study the mechanisms that cause motion sickness in space and to test hardware, including the new EVA suit and the Crew Dragon capsule itself .
Because the original Crew Dragon design did not include an airlock, the entire cabin must be depressurized for the crew to perform EVA tasks. This led to major modifications that allowed the interior of the capsule to withstand the hard vacuum. SpaceX also added a nitrogen pressure recovery system to complete EVA mission duties. In addition, handrails and footrests were installed inside the spacecraft, and a ladder interface was introduced into the hatch opening to facilitate astronaut egress.
Instead of outfitting each Polaris Dawn astronaut with an IVA suit as well as a new EVA suit, the crew will don SpaceX’s EVA suit for both launch and landing, as well as during the EVA mission.
“We’re going to vent the cabin to a vacuum and then we’re going to do an EVA operation where we hope to learn a lot about our suits and the operation associated with them,” Isaacman said, adding, “This is the first commercial EVA. This is the first time you don’t have government astronauts undertaking such a mission. And that’s important because someday we’ll get to the moon or Mars and explore and build and fix things.
“And that means knowledge of spacewalks and EVAs needs to go beyond just the few that exist today.”
