SpaceX IVA Suit (Crew Dragon Pressure Suit)

[Cheapchips]

It was a bit of a failure that Bob and Doug looked like they were sporting 'space dad' physiques in the first iteration.  Nice to see that the design is maturing.

[Zed_Noir]

<snip.
The jacket also looks like it's more securely attached to the pants, based on how the grey seams line up.

It is not separate jacket and pants. The suit is one piece with the fake jacket effect. Quite impressive for what is more or less a pair of coveralls.

[Mandella]

<snip.
The jacket also looks like it's more securely attached to the pants, based on how the grey seams line up.

It is not separate jacket and pants. The suit is one piece with the fake jacket effect. Quite impressive for what is more or less a pair of coveralls.

One of the astronauts from Crew 2 (Soichi?) even made the observation that the entire suit was pretty much just a big hat, since you put it on over your head.

 

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/wordsmithfl/status/1416767179882647558

The @SpaceX #DM2 flight suits are on display in the @ExploreSpaceKSC #Atlantis exhibit.

[Oersted]

https://twitter.com/Thom_astro/status/1417566191099564036

This image got me thinking... How would the IVA suit perform in an emergency if they had to use it for an EVA outside the station? Yes, I know, the probability of that happening is miniscule, but ... what if?

They would of course have to bring an external oxygen supply. Do they have one? I mean one of those suitcases sometimes seen at launch. Could they hook up to something they could bring outside from the station, perhaps with the buddy-buddy system? In extremis, how long would the air inside the suit last, before the carbon dioxide levels are too high? I guess only a few minutes...

Also, how would the suit fare outside when it comes to radiation and heat regulation?

It would be a very bad day on the ISS if this were to happen, but I guess it is a contingency that has been studied.

[Robotbeat]

 It’d be similar to the Gemini flights which first tried EVAs.

We have a thread on EVA with a SpaceX IVA suit somewhere.

[Comga]

.@NASA highlights the @SpaceX Crew-3 mission with a pair of virtual media briefings on Oct. 6 and Oct. 7. More... https://go.nasa.gov/3A2wgHD


Commander Raja Chari
Pilot Thomas Marshburn
Mission Specialist Kayla Barron
Mission Specialist Matthias Maurer

https://twitter.com/Space_Station/status/1443957626962862081

Question:
What’s the aesthetic intent of the two panels of glare on all the portraits of astros in their SpaceX helmets?
A visual reference to Dave Bowman in 2001 A Space Odyssey?
Basic physical optics says it should be easy to suppress.
It seems like an odd choice to leave it in.

[nacnud]

I think they reflections from the soft boxes used to light the crews faces. I suppose you could use a flash mounted on the camera but then the reflection will be in the middle of the face. Another option would be take the portraits without the visor down.

I wouldn't say it's a homage to 2001, more like 2001 got the physics of reflections from visors correct.

Hollywood now uses lights inside the helmet to light faces, or digitally adds the visor later.

[Comga]

I think they reflections from the soft boxes used to light the crews faces. I suppose you could use a flash mounted on the camera but then the reflection will be in the middle of the face. Another option would be take the portraits without the visor down.

I wouldn't say it's a homage to 2001, more like 2001 got the physics of reflections from visors correct.

Hollywood now uses lights inside the helmet to light faces, or digitally adds the visor later.

We know WHERE the glare is coming from.
I’m not talking about a different flash or stage-prop lights inside the helmet.
That glare from the lights (could well be “soft boxes”) can be filtered out but they don’t do that.
Why not?

[Welsh Dragon]

I think they reflections from the soft boxes used to light the crews faces. I suppose you could use a flash mounted on the camera but then the reflection will be in the middle of the face. Another option would be take the portraits without the visor down.

I wouldn't say it's a homage to 2001, more like 2001 got the physics of reflections from visors correct.

Hollywood now uses lights inside the helmet to light faces, or digitally adds the visor later.

We know WHERE the glare is coming from.
I’m not talking about a different flash or stage-prop lights inside the helmet.
That glare from the lights (could well be “soft boxes”) can be filtered out but they don’t do that.
Why not?

Because it looks cool? Why would there need to be any other reason?

[wirehead]

I think they reflections from the soft boxes used to light the crews faces. I suppose you could use a flash mounted on the camera but then the reflection will be in the middle of the face. Another option would be take the portraits without the visor down.

I wouldn't say it's a homage to 2001, more like 2001 got the physics of reflections from visors correct.

Hollywood now uses lights inside the helmet to light faces, or digitally adds the visor later.

We know WHERE the glare is coming from.
I’m not talking about a different flash or stage-prop lights inside the helmet.
That glare from the lights (could well be “soft boxes”) can be filtered out but they don’t do that.
Why not?

On the side, I do a lot of art and portrait photography so here's my take...

The photos were taken with, as best I can tell, a rectangular softbox to the left and right and a bit forward of the face, probably not even very far off of the side of the frame.

This is a fairly standard lighting setup for portraiture.  Traditionally, one would be brighter ("key") and the other would be dimmer ("fill") but a lot of people in the past decade or so decided that they really like fill and key to be at the same level.  Also traditionally, they tend to add a rim light from behind and a light on the background but in this case, I don't think either of those lights are present.

A *lot* of stuff where you are emphasizing the macho machismo Olympian vibe of a person use this lighting setup.  If you want to bump it up to eleven, you move the lights even more to the side.  A lot of ballets have the lighting on each side of the stage and it really highlights the muscle definition of the dancers.  There's a practical consideration here that the visor only has so much coverage and you might end up with the face dark if you were to try to move the lighting more to the side.

Either way, with the softbox it's going to be a nice diffused light source that is going to hide wrinkles and blemishes on the skin as all big light sources do.

Furthermore, people tend to look a lot better if you put the light to the side instead of straight-on.  You can get around this by using a ring light that wraps around the camera.  However, if you were to do that here, you'd get a glint on the visor.

Now, if you don't want the glint, you have a few options.  One is that you photograph them with the visor up, which might look dorky depending on the suit design.  The second option is to construct a replacement visor that looks exactly the same but doesn't actually have any glass (if you see the 2016 Ghostbusters movie and see the part where Chris Hemsworth puts his fingers through where the lenses are, apparently Chris Hemsworth did that accidentally because the glasses are traditionally glass-less for shooting convenience and they decided it fit the character) Third, you do complicated stuff with polarizers -- no, you can't just use a single polarizer filter to get rid of the glare.  Or fourth, you just shoot it and then somebody gets to paint the glints out.

Returning to the earlier point, if there was a ringlight, it's going to obscure the face and make it really hard to fake out.

You can actually reverse-engineer a most lighting setups by looking at a shiny surface and looking at the characteristic reflections.  Zoom in on the eyeballs if you have to.

Photography, like rocket science, comes with a lot of immovable limitations.  Can't make magical physics-defying light fixtures.  It also has a wide problem and solution space and you kinda have to figure out which compromises to make and having a good gut feel for which areas to explore helps a lot.

This lighting setup is actually an easy setup; you can easily rent in pretty much any city the required hardware to do it and any number of photographers can reproduce it.  It doesn't even require you to have a proper studio; a factory floor or conference room works just fine.  It reduces wrinkles while highlighting features, across a wide variety of people.  It doesn't require you to pose the astronauts even, you can just tell them to look straight at the camera and make their hero face.  It's not dated, it's at least vaguely hip right now.  It requires their flight-issue spacesuit without any special-purpose bits, just make sure the visor does not have fingerprints.  It means that the astronaut might not be breathing the same air as the photographer in times of COVID or even just times of quarantine.  And it doesn't require much editing, plus it's easy to cut the black part out and paste it into a larger composition.

Also, if they removed the glints, you'd notice they were gone, not necessarily consciously, but it risks making things obviously edited.  Glassless glasses in movies are much more of a reasonable conceit than in portraiture; a family member has kids who wear thick glasses and she flipped out at the school photographer for badly editing the glasses flare of her children.

Having photographed performers wearing spacesuit costumes on multiple occasions, yeah there's a bunch of really interesting things I would do.  But I'm an artist and then if you wanted some future astronauts to be photographed, you'd have to come back to me or it would be glaringly different.  And my results wouldn't be easy for someone to slap into an infographic.  So much about this setup just working reasonably well in a lot of circumstances wins on practical, not artistic, considerations.

Plus, yeah, artistically, I like the look because it accentuates the spacesuit nature of the spacesuit as well as referencing 2001 as well as the Anna Lee Fisher shot.  It also gives you a very different look from the visors-up standard Soyuz shot that they've been doing since the Soyuz-TM or so.  Plus, it's very right now.  Go check out the new Dune movie where they intentionally preserved reflections in all of the transparent surfaces; I suspect that we're going to see people moving towards more glared-up transparent windows and visors going forward.  So it even works pretty darn well on artistic considerations.

Think of it as the Atlas / Centaur stainless steel balloon tank of photography setups, existing at an interesting spot on the multi-dimensional solution space that works out actually a little better than it ought to.

[John-H]

The reflections of the lights on the sides of the faces make the faces longer and leaner, which is good. It is the same reason that the suits have side panels in a contrasting colour to make the waist look smaller. If you are selling rides, it is important to make your customers as slim and attractive as possible.


John

[Murrayfield]

It's been a while since anything new was posted here - but this article has a couple of new bits of info. The creator thanks Peter Homer (former SpaceX suit engineer), so I guess this was some sort of interview or something.

https://www.primalspace.shop/blogs/news/how-spacex-mastered-the-space-suit

It says the SpaceX suit had to meet NASA's requirements of 40kPa, which is relatively high for an IVA suit. I don't believe we have an exact figure, but earlier in the thread some people were debating about this. This seems to confirm it's at least 40kPa.

Also some interesting info on the joint design which uses the suit's own pressure against itself. I believe this came from Peter Homer's famous glove design which is why SpaceX hired him in the first place. Anyway, worth a read and about time we updated this thread.

[deadman1204]

It's been a while since anything new was posted here - but this article has a couple of new bits of info. The creator thanks Peter Homer (former SpaceX suit engineer), so I guess this was some sort of interview or something.

https://www.primalspace.shop/blogs/news/how-spacex-mastered-the-space-suit

It says the SpaceX suit had to meet NASA's requirements of 40kPa, which is relatively high for an IVA suit. I don't believe we have an exact figure, but earlier in the thread some people were debating about this. This seems to confirm it's at least 40kPa.

Also some interesting info on the joint design which uses the suit's own pressure against itself. I believe this came from Peter Homer's famous glove design which is why SpaceX hired him in the first place. Anyway, worth a read and about time we updated this thread.

For current space suits, astronauts have to spend several hours breathing special air to avoid pressure sickness (like deep divers might do for a dive prep). Even with all the preparation, getting pressure sickness is still a possibility. If an astronaut in space gets pressure sickness ... well they're stuck up in space (and will have to go through multiple pressure changes during a return). Its a legitimate fear.

The higher operating pressure is a huge increase in safety. It also means that crew don't need to spend part of a day preparing to put on a space suit.

[Dalhousie]

It's been a while since anything new was posted here - but this article has a couple of new bits of info. The creator thanks Peter Homer (former SpaceX suit engineer), so I guess this was some sort of interview or something.

https://www.primalspace.shop/blogs/news/how-spacex-mastered-the-space-suit

It says the SpaceX suit had to meet NASA's requirements of 40kPa, which is relatively high for an IVA suit. I don't believe we have an exact figure, but earlier in the thread some people were debating about this. This seems to confirm it's at least 40kPa.

Also some interesting info on the joint design which uses the suit's own pressure against itself. I believe this came from Peter Homer's famous glove design which is why SpaceX hired him in the first place. Anyway, worth a read and about time we updated this thread.

For current space suits, astronauts have to spend several hours breathing special air to avoid pressure sickness (like deep divers might do for a dive prep). Even with all the preparation, getting pressure sickness is still a possibility. If an astronaut in space gets pressure sickness ... well they're stuck up in space (and will have to go through multiple pressure changes during a return). Its a legitimate fear.

The higher operating pressure is a huge increase in safety. It also means that crew don't need to spend part of a day preparing to put on a space suit.

If this is the operating (as opposed to a test) pressure then 40 kPa will make the suit very difficult to move in when inflated.  It's basically a soft basketball.  You'd better he hoping the crew would be brought back automatically if they need to inflate the suit because the certainly won't be able to do much in in it.

It's not the 1st suit to use this pressure either.  Sokol does as well.

[Robotbeat]

They could deflate the suit to a lower pressure over time, but being able to operate at high pressure like the Russian suits means avoiding the bends and the need to do a lengthy pre-breathe. You can essentially pre breathe while using the suit.

But I think nearly everything in this article is about the IVA only suit.