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SpaceX Reveals its "Spacesuit"

Accepted submission by takyon at 2017-08-24 02:17:35
Hardware

Elon Musk has unveiled the spacesuit [arstechnica.com] (or flight suit) that will be used by astronauts aboard crewed Dragon flights:

In his Instagram post [instagram.com], Musk added that this suit was not a mock-up but rather a fully functional unit. "Already tested to double vacuum pressure," he wrote. "Was incredibly hard to balance aesthetics and function. Easy to do either separately." (Double vacuum pressure simply means the suit was probably inflated to twice the pressure of sea level and then put into a vacuum chamber.)

Musk gave no other technical information about the suit. Most strikingly, it is white, in contrast to the very blue spacesuits unveiled by Boeing [arstechnica.com] in January.

These are not, strictly speaking, "space suits." Rather, they are more properly flight suits designed to be worn during the ride to space and again on the ride back down to Earth. They have a limited time in which they can operate in a full vacuum and are not intended for spacewalks.

Related: Boeing Unveils New Spacesuits for Starliner Astronaut Taxi [soylentnews.org]


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