SpaceX New EVA Suit is One of Many New Space, Moon and Mars Suits

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Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require millions of spacesuits. The development of many new suit and the execution of the spacewalk will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions as life becomes multiplanetary.

This EVA suit evolve from the Intravehicular Activity (IVA) suit, the EVA suit provides greater mobility, a state-of-the-art helmet Heads-Up Display (HUD) and camera, new thermal management textiles, and materials borrowed from Falcon’s interstage and Dragon’s trunk.

At ~700 km above Earth, the EVA suit will support the @PolarisProgram’s Polaris Dawn crew in the vacuum of space during the first-ever commercial astronaut spacewalk.

The new suit has ring joints at the shoulder and wrist.

The Dragon IVA suit was less bulky and is shown below.

NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley, wearing SpaceX spacesuits, walk through the Crew Access Arm connecting the launch tower to the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft during a dress rehearsal at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 17, 2020. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft stand on the launch pad at Launch Complex 39A ahead of the company’s uncrewed In-Flight Abort Test. The flight test will demonstrate the spacecraft’s escape capabilities in preparation for crewed flights to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. Behnken and Hurley are slated to fly on the company’s first crewed mission, Demo-2.

12 thoughts on “SpaceX New EVA Suit is One of Many New Space, Moon and Mars Suits”

  2. Not so fast with the weighted suits.

    Your apparent weight changes according to your locale but your actual mass does not change.

    On the moon a 180 lb person would need to wear a mass of 1080 lbs to apply an apparent 1G force downwards on their body… but to MOVE that mass they would need to exert the strength to move 1080 lbs.

  3. Have space suit, will travel.

    If Elon wants his dreams to come true, he will need to have a way to make and sell space worthy EVA suits for a few thousand bucks each, at least less than the Mars ticket, so everyone can have theirs, or to ensure they will be readily available whenever needed.

    So spacesuits will have to evolve and become commodities.

  4. I have a question (I mentioned in a previous post) about an EVA suit for working/living on the moon. Does it make sense, for that person to have a “weighted” suit, that makes that person move in a way that’s closer to 1G? Two big reasons: One, we KNOW how to move quite well in 1G. Two, we don’t know the minimum amount of gravity needed to prevent serious medical consequences we know happen when people experience micro-gravity (0-G) for any “reasonable” period of time.

    This same concept can apply to clothing worn inside structures, for the same reasons. Maybe some like bouncing around, but that may get old if you just want to get stuff done. About fashion? Wrong guy to ask.

    • That very same notion has been bouncing around in my head for 20 years. Weighted clothing could help slow down muscle and bone degradation although it would do little for internal organs. I think the answer is that we wont know until we go there and try it out.

      • I agree. We won’t know until we go there and find out. But lack of gravity, or perhaps lower gravity, affects much more then muscle and bone health. We now (rather recently) have learned it affects neurological and immunological health. Lack of gravity, really f**** up ones whole body. We have no idea what amount of gravity is enough to prevent this.

        We know 1G is very good for our health. That’s why clothing that properly adds the weight to a person say on the moon, makes sense to me.

      • I also agree that simple weights are not likely to make such a technology “work well enough”. It’s more likely (IMO) we’re going to need artificial muscles (weights, w/a pat# more or less) that anticipate what our muscles “do” before they move, and after they do after just that. We need anticipatory technology, and this is where biology is so good at “doing that”. Call it the “twitch effect”.

        We all know and have experienced how that works. If your reading this, it’s very likely you’ve had a muscle cramp or hiccup at least once in your life. (If not, your shockingly young) This is an example of a biological feed back loop. We can incorporate this into our technology that does.t hurt (like a cramp) or make you say pardon me, when you hiccup.

        But it makes our technology follow rules that unlike 1’s&0’s have been around for at least 2 billion years, and is unimaginably robust. No, biological systems are not as fast as digital/electronic technology. But they don’t “die” if a single 1or0 is in the “wrong place” in a billion line code.

    • Wouldn’t really be safe; As Smog notes, you’d have to carry half a ton of extra mass to bring your weight up to Earth weight. You’d have an absurd amount of inertia to deal with moving around. And if you tripped, or bumped into somebody in a hall? Massive injuries.

      I suppose you could come up with something like a light weight ring anchored to the floor with vacuum or magnets, but supported by bearings so that it would freely move, and then have elastic cords pulling you down. But it wouldn’t do anything about a lot of the effects of low gravity internally, it would just solve the bone loading and muscle atrophy. They’re trying something like that on the ISS, I believe, with elastic bands loading you down while exercising on a treadmill.

      Maybe you could use a pressure suit with different pressure zones that tried to simulate gravity by external pressure. It might at least compensate for the fluid shifts by pushing the fluids back down where they belonged.

      • Your right about simple weights being a problem. You need adaptive, fluidic technology that behave like our muscles do. When you tense a muscle, nearby muscles
        “anticipate” the need to tense as well. Often, nearby muscles don’t need to do anything. But they “prime” themselves to react, just in case. If not, often we’d fall down and go boom. Oops.
        We need our technology to be reactive and predictive, just like our muscles are. Much more then dumb weights indeed.

      • As always, you make several excellent points. Regarding inertia, wearing just a “dumb” weighted shirt/pants may have you fly into a wall/bulkhead that’s in the direction of where you want to go. You want to get “their”, but not like that… I know of somewhat new materials used in ballistic projectile armor that “hardens” (by lining up certain materials, in a linear configuration at the molecular level) either by physical impact, or the application of a magnetic field.
        I’d love to change the mass of an object (right, for my next trick, I’ll invent warp drive) But since I can’t, can we manipulate the mass of an object, and direct it’s inertia to go where we want it to?

        The whole point, is to design proactive materials that react to conditions before they “emerge”, and must become actionable in their “new” environment. Biological systems must do this to survive. I’m wondering if there’s anything here, or the above referenced technology we can apply here.

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