All right, I'm Stu Teach. I'm the Vice President of Dragon
here at SpaceX. I've been at SpaceX for about 10
years, and I've led the Dragon program since 2021, and it's a
it's been a busy year for us this year.
In 2024, we launched the Axiom 3 mission back in January.
In February we launched the Crew 8 mission up to ISS and and
brought Crew Seven home and just earlier this week we had a
successful conclusion of the CRS 30 mission and a port relocation
of the Crew 8 Dragon capsule up on ISS.
With those operations concluded, I'm excited to announce that
Polaris Don is the next major operation for the Dragon
program. Right now the whole team is
driving towards a launch date in early summer of this year and
we're we're super excited to chat with you all about mission
design and overall objectives. We have the full crew and some
SpaceX folks on this event right now and want to turn it over to
them to introduce Jared if you maybe want to start.
Sure. Great to be here, Steve.
Big day for sure on May the 4th. And yeah, my name is Jared
Isaacman, Commander of Polaris. Dawn and looking forward to
speaking with you all today. And hey, my name is Chris Trigg.
I'm manager of the Space View team here at SpaceX.
Hey everyone, I am Anna Menon and I am a one of the mission
specialists as well as the medical officer on the players
on mission as well as a SpaceX engineer.
And hey folks, this is Sarah Gillis.
I am also engineer at SpaceX and the other missions specialist
for the players on flight. I think we're we know Kidd
Poteet, our mission pilot, is here with us in the spaces as
well. I think we're just trying to
designate him as as one of the speakers, but he says hi.
All right. Thanks, folks.
Yeah, let's dig in and start with a high level summary of the
Polaris program and Polaris Don as a mission and and the
objectives we're driving to. Jared, can you give us an
overview of those? Yeah, sure.
I mean just want to open up I mean this this space is is
really it's really all about you know the thousands of Spacexers
who spent the the last two years working on some really really
awesome objectives that we're going to, we're going to share
with you later today. I mean they're they pretty much
every day are are making history and we've got the next big
milestone coming up on that that that awesome vision to make life
multiplanetary. But just to zoom out for a
little bit talk on the Polaris program.
So first we named it Polaris after our North Star, which is
actually a constellation of three stars.
And as I think many of you know, the Polaris program contemplates
up to three missions, culminating with the first crude
flight of Starship, which is kind of our North Star that is
showing us the way, may very well be the 737 of human Space
Flight someday, but it's it's the planned vehicle to return
humans to the moon and then on to to Mars and beyond.
But that's in the future. Let's like drill in to Polaris
Dawn because that is that is the mission coming up.
So just to give a quick overview of some of those objectives and
then you know each of my, my crew members will kind of go
into a little bit more details, but it's a very ambitious
mission. Our first objective is to travel
farther from the Earth and the last time humans walked on the
moon with Apollo 17 more than 50 years ago.
So we target an apogee of 1400 kilometers.
That puts us just inside the the Van Allen radiation belt.
It's an awesome opportunity for us to get some data.
But really it's it's about kind of pushing beyond our, our
comfort zone and where we've been at for, you know the last
20 some odd years at an awesome orbiting laboratory, the space
station. But if we're, if we're going to
get to the moon, Mars and beyond, we got to, we got to
start venturing out a little bit farther.
After about 7-7 or so laps at our peak, Apogee will come down
to about 700 kilometers. And this is where the news of
the day kicks in and all the hard work from the SpaceX team
to produce an Eva suit and, you know, really the first of its
kind to be tested in more than 40 years in space.
And we'll vent the cabin down to vacuum.
And then we will undertake an Eva operation where we hope to
learn an awful lot about our suits and the operation
associated with it because it's the first commercial Eva.
It's the first time you don't have, you know, government
astronauts undertaking such a mission.
And that's important because we are going to get to the moon or
Mars someday. We're going to have to get out
of our vehicles, out of the safety of a habitat and explore
and build and repair things. And that means the knowledge for
space walks in and EVAS has to go beyond just the the few that
it exists with today. Third, we're going to test out
laser based communication over Starlink.
We have something super exciting planned for that.
It's a really big deal. And that also is about the
future of human spaceflight and reducing dependencies on, you
know, legacy ground stations or you know, overburdened teacher
satellites. But to take advantage of laser
based communications to kind of open up this world for
potentially hundreds of starships in the future.
And then we have 5 days of science and research, about 40
experiments that are our crew will talk to you about shortly.
But yeah, that's the Polaris Dawn and it's coming up really,
really fast. Back to you, Sue.
Sherrod Yeah, pretty badass mission profile.
Want to start off with Starlink? It's it's humbling to think that
we're going to leverage this incredible network of thousands
of satellites that SpaceX launches is growing, owns and
operates every single day on Dragon our our human rated
spacecraft. The the constellation itself is
going to talk directly to Dragon through the laser based comms as
as Jared mentioned. But I think kid is on audio now.
Wanted to hand it over to him to chat through how Starlink will
be used on Polaris Dawn and some of the the global outreach and
objectives you all have. Absolutely, thanks.
Do apologies for missing the intro, I'm a kid.
Poteet, the mission pilot. Just briefly background 20 years
flying F16's assignments with the Thunderbirds operational
task to grassroots weapons, school and combat tours.
But as far as Starlink, this is an amazing objective we have set
forth for this mission. As Jared had mentioned, you know
the Flares is a developmental program and it's designed to
help advance our our quest for space exploration.
However, based on what we learned and and accomplished
with inspiration for, we never wanted to lose sight of our
priority to stay focused on improving life here on Earth.
And that's exactly what SpaceX is doing with Starlink.
You know, it's a laser based communication that's truly
revolutionizing the way we communicate and connecting
people from around the world to include remote locations.
You know that. That's why we we continue this
partnership with Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital.
We had this unique opportunity to travel to other parts of the
world and through this collaboration we brought them
Starlink included hospitals and schools in the Philippines,
Chile, Brazil, Mozambique and these are providing services to
the people of these countries that otherwise wouldn't have
these resources. You know, when we went to the
Philippines, the hospitals, families that that lived in very
remote locations would have to travel hours just to get any
type of medical care. Now we brought them Starlink and
they're able to connect with these remote locations and
they're getting telemedicine, medical consultations,
diagnostics procedures. They can continue this education
while they're getting all this treatment and they can stay
connected with their families that are back in these remote
locations. So it's, you know, it's it's
absolutely amazing what's SpaceX is doing with Starlink and we're
going to test that from space for the very first time and and
stay tuned for how we're going to do that on orbit, but it's
going to be exciting to watch for sure.
Thanks. Good.
Yeah, it's going to be incredible.
Truly space based Internet used by people in space.
We're we're excited to make that happen.
Pivoting over to the research side of things.
I I know everyone refers to ISS as the orbiting laboratory and
it's incredible the amount of science and research that's done
up there by crew year round every single day 24/7 and we're
excited to turn Dragon into its own orbiting laboratory.
We bet on inspiration four. We're excited to grow the the
research program at SpaceX as we move forward and fly more people
on Starship farther and and continue to grow that industry.
Anna, can you maybe chat through some of the research goals and
activities planned for the Polaris Dawn mission?
Thanks, Stu. About two years ago we put out a
call for proposals all over the world to solicit research ideas
to run on this mission and we got back a ton of ideas.
We ultimately down selected to about 40 research experiments
and we down selected based on technical feasibility, technical
requirements, crew involvement, as well as the experiments
ability to take advantage of our unique mission profile.
We are going to be we. It's really important to us that
we take advantage of basically every moment of time while we're
in space. And so intermixed amongst those
other ambitious objectives, objectives that Jared was
talking about earlier, we will be filling our days with science
and research and I will highlight a few of the ones that
we're really excited about. But but there are just there's
so much to learn on this mission.
So, so one is that we will be taking advantage of our flying
at a really high altitude in order to better understand that
radiation environment. While we are up there, we will
be actually using a camera to try to harness the radiation
environment and see if we can perform kind of an initial test
of capturing X-ray images using that environment that we're
sitting in. This could be super beneficial
down the road if we're able to to perform initial
demonstrations and and if you envision you know going to Mars
one day, you would want to be able to have medical diagnostic
capabilities that are small and really agile to support the
humans living there. Other experiments that will
perform are ones on space motion sickness.
We will try to better understand what are the mechanisms and
causes causing this. If you when you when people fly
to space 60, about 60% of people get afflicted by space motion
sickness. And if you envision what that
looks like if you were to take a whole bunch of people into
space, that means that a whole bunch of people could be sick
and not feeling great during their initial adaptation to that
microgravity environment. So if we're better able to
understand this, we can make future astronauts lives way
better when they're going to space.
And finally, another experiment set of experiments we're really
excited about is a group all focusing on spaceflight
associated Neuro Ocular Syndrome.
We will be testing our eyes to better understand why vision
problems arise in long duration microgravity exposure.
A lot of astronauts face vision changes after extended duration
Space Flight. If you envision flying nine
months to Mars and you land there and you can't see well,
you're not going to be able to work well.
And so it's really important that we figure out what are the
mechanisms behind this and better arm our future astronauts
to do their work well in space. Thanks, Anna.
Yeah, it's going to be an action-packed five days up there
like Jared said, and I know the Van Allen belts and some of the
radiation ties to the research that you all will be doing.
But stepping back, can you also describe the unique trajectory
and and exactly where Dragon will be flying for this this
mission? Definitely.
So we will be essentially launching into a highly
elliptical orbit where our perigee is at about 190
kilometers, but our apogee is at about 1200 kilometers.
We will then, after a number of orbits, be raising our apogee up
to about 1400 kilometers. And this is the highest that any
human has flown in about 50 years since Apollo.
And the benefit of being at this high altitude is that we can
better understand the impacts of that that environment, that
higher radiation environment for example on both the human body
doing a lot of that research I mentioned earlier as well as the
the spacecraft. After a number of orbits there,
we will we'll complete all the research that we were intending
to do, intending to do, and then we will lower our apogee back
down to a nice coasting orbit around 700 kilometers, where we
will complete the rest of our mission objectives, including
the spacewalk. It's pretty amazing, yeah.
For folks that have been following along with SpaceX over
the last few years, the Falcon team has done an incredible job
of increasing performance of Falcon 9.
And what we're doing here essentially is leveraging
performance upgrades and truly using everything that Falcon can
provide to Dragon to get it to the highest energy insertion
orbit while still recovering the first stage.
And then Dragon takes it from there, gets up to Max apogee on,
continues the mission down to the the Eva altitude, and then
obviously return to Earth for splashdown, shifting gears to
the Eva. So we've had to make a lot of
changes to Dragon to facilitate an Eva.
It's always possible for our traditional ISS missions that
Dragon was built for, to vent the cabin down to vacuum in a
contingency. It was built for that case, but
in the Eva we're nominally taking the four crew members to
vacuum for this this spacewalk. So Sarah, curious if you can
chat us through some of the modifications made to Dragon and
and really what it takes to to make this happen.
Definitely Stu. Yeah.
You know, you you described it so well, there is a chance on a
a nominal NASA mission that the the spacecraft could end up at
vacuum in an emergency. But for this mission, we're
intentionally taking the spacecraft to vacuum.
And this comes with a whole set of challenges that the SpaceX
team has been tackling over the last two years.
Fundamentally, when Dragon was made, this kind of wasn't what
the interior was designed for. And so there's so many different
aspects that you need to consider when we don't have an
airlock on Dragons. So in order to perform a
spacewalk we have to take the entire interior down to vacuum.
So just from thinking through all the things on the interior,
we need to now take a look at every material.
As you start exposing things to vacuum, you're going to have
things that off gas. So you need to understand what
all of the materials, literally everything in the vehicle is
going to do in that environment. I would say some of the the big
changes though are once we vent the atmosphere for the
spacewalk, we also need to repressurize the spacecraft.
So there's going to be a brand new nitrogen repressurization
system that flies with us that will be used at the conclusion
of the Eva to then repressurize the spacecraft.
Similarly, in order to facilitate the spacewalk, we
also had to go and assess what are all of the mobility aids and
footholds that you need in order to actually be able to move and
perform this space walk safely inside the spacecraft.
So I think that the interior is going to look a little different
when we, you know, when you see pictures of a sitting in the
spacecraft, there is some really, really cool new hardware
both mobility aids and this nitrogen system.
But it's, you know, it's been a a really integrated team effort
to understand what the spacecraft is going to do when
we expose the interior to vacuum.
I think the maybe last change for mobility aids is instead of
the beautiful cupola window that was flown on Inspiration 4, now
we will have this, what we're calling the Skywalker, but a new
structure outside the top of the forward hatch that allows a
suited crew member to have a structure to interface with
almost hand holds as you climb out the top of the spacecraft.
But it's been really cool to see that hardware all come together
in our our flight spacecraft. Yeah, the the structure that'll
be out front of Dragon as a a mobility aid.
We we call it the Skywalker as Sarah mentioned it.
It has to withstand a pretty extreme environment.
It's close to the forward bulkhead Dracos that perform
Delta V maneuvers and so it gets hot during those burns.
And then it also has to be able to withstand the cold of
pointing if it's oriented towards deep space.
So it's a metallic structure, but it also has a thermal
barrier coating on it and is quite quite advanced to to
facilitate the the mobility aid that the crews are going to
utilize when they're out front of Dragon.
Want to pivot over to the Eva suit itself.
For every ISS mission inspiration for every Crew
Dragon flight to date we produce 4 intra vehicular suits that
pressurize and and keep the crew safe in case of a contingency.
But it is a step change to go intentionally do that and go out
into the vacuum of space and the human themselves is looking at
deep space or or the sun or various thermal extremes.
So Chris Trigg on the line, want to hand it off to you to talk
through some of the modifications to the suit and
and really what it took to create the the EPA suit revealed
this morning. Yeah, sure.
So as you mentioned Sue, we kind of started with the IBA suit
that we have on our missions currently as our baseline and
kind of took it from there, what would we need to change in order
to support an EBA. And and one challenge actually
was to make sure that we kept all the functionality of the IBA
suit in addition to adding the Eva capability.
So we're we're using a single suit on the player stawn
mission, so the crew will be wearing it out to the pad all
the way through splashdown. So we wanted to make sure that
everything the current IBA suit could do, we maintain that
functionality but then also made it Eva capable as well.
So one big item out of the gate was mobility.
We've done a lot of work on joints across the suit to make
the suit more mobile and now that the crew will be getting
out of their seats and moving outside of the capsule onto
Skywalker. So a lot of new joint design
across the entire body. One of the the joints that we
worked really hard on, other rotators on the arms and the
shoulders and the wrists which allow the the rotation of those
joints. And they're unique in that when
they're unpressurized, they stay soft and flexible so that during
dynamic phases of flight like launch or re entry, you don't
have hard metallic objects that are kind of loading into the
body of the crew members, but they stay soft.
And then when you pressurize the suit, they rigidize it and give
you that mobility that you need. Another big element was the
thermal side of the suit. So obviously much larger thermal
extremes that the suit will see when it goes outside of Dragon
versus what it sees inside. So there's a lot of work on both
the materials of the suit. Developing a whole new layer
that we needed to add for thermal management, as well as
looking at the thermal condition for the crew members themselves
and making sure that they were at a comfortable temperature
inside the suit. And one of the things that we
added to their umbilical was a cooling knob that they'll be
able to turn on or off to get cooling as they needed.
Another big element was somatic functionality in the helmet.
Jared and Sarah will have cameras in their helmet, so
we'll have a kind of first person view of what they're
seeing through their visor throughout the Eva.
And then all the crew members have a HUD, a heads up display
in their helmet as well, which is displaying the real time
pressure, temperature and humidity inside their suit as
well as a timer so they can keep track of the time of the overall
Eva. And so those are just some of
the bigger ones, but really a kind of total overhaul of the
design when we got to the end of it here in terms of revisiting
everything that we could to make the suit safer and more robust
given that we now know that we're going to vacuum for the,
for the. Eva, thanks, Chris.
Yeah. So with the the new suit in mind
and obviously an Eva is an austere environment that you all
will be going into. Sarah, can you explain to us how
do you train for an Eva? That's a great question.
I think you know, typically when you hear EBA, the first thought
is build a pool, use mutual buoyancy as a means of
simulating the microgravity environment.
We've been on obviously a much shorter development cycle and
putting a suit into the pool has its own challenges.
And so the SpaceX team really approached it from a different
and new direction of finding a means of doing that outside of
water. And so we actually have at our
facilities in Hawthorne and our our vertical capsule simulator,
they they figured out a way to put in a suspension system that
has really cool controls such that if you, you know, tap
something with your finger, you move very similarly to what you
would experience in microgravity.
So picture a pressurized suit in a suspension system that can go
through kind of the the transition out of the
spacecraft, but you're on suspension cables and so you
have those cables that would go through the Hatch.
So when we were starting to think through how do you train
hatch operations, the team, you know, over a weekend pull
together this incredible simulator that actually takes
that and turns on its side. So now you can suspend a crew
member sideways and practice hatch operations in a very high
fidelity microgravity environment simulation.
So it's been, it's been a ton of fun over the last couple years
to iterate with the team. You know the suit gets a certain
change to it. We put that into our test
facilities, we run the operation, we see what works or
what we might need to change from a hardware perspective for
mobility aids or from architecture changes to the
suit. And it's been this really cool
iterative test cycle over the last couple years.
Hey if Steve, if you don't mind I I just want to jump in on on
this too and and give like a shout out to Chris Trigg and and
his his whole suit design team. Chris just spoke before
regarding the suit development. But I have to say, going back to
like inspiration for when I first got introduced, SpaceX, I
was like, you know, they have all these ambitious goals.
They're reusing rockets, they catch on ships, they're trying
to build spaceships to take us back to moon or Mars.
Why have like why don't you just buy somebody else's suit and
then like maybe on the surface you're like, well it's really
it's like the aesthetics, you know, looking very cool and
inspiring about the future is important and and I'm sure
there's a component to that. But like it's this vertical
integration desire to like control all the pieces necessary
to eventually get to that like self-sustaining kind of Mars
civilization. And and we were able to see it
in practice over the last two years.
I mean just so cool from where we started to where we are now.
And it's like all in house and every, you know, every week or
two you come back and Chris and his team, you know, figured out
a new joint or you know, a new approach to the visor coding or
new ways to have redundancy on like the life support system.
I mean you know aesthetically it may look similar to the IBA but
what they did under the hood is extraordinary and they do it in
two years was only possible based on like SpaceX
philosophies and what it like in what's in house that Chris and
his team oversee it. It's just been like such a
pleasure to watch and really today's as an as an unveil is
like a far bigger moment for you and your team Chris, than than
it is for us who who are fortunate enough to wear these
suits. Yeah, Jared, I really appreciate
that. And obviously this has been
really a dream project for the whole team.
A lot of people here have worked on suits since really really on
at SpaceX and got to develop IBA suits leading up to Demo 2.
So it's been extremely exciting for all of us to get to kind of
developed Spacex's first Eva suit as well with with the
Polaris program. Yeah I want to pile on really
great job to the suits team and and Chris, I agree it's been
amazing watching this machine evolve over the last couple
years of development. But also want to point out it's
an extremely multidisciplinary problem to create an Eva suit
the the heads up display that Chris mentioned that was a
project partnered with the avionics team within SpaceX.
There's some pretty intense optical challenges to to make
that work and make sure the field of view is correct without
blocking the center of the suit. The coating on the visor for the
Eva suit was actually partnered with some of the folks at SpaceX
that work to coat the cupola on inspiration for.
It's a very similar spray process and and actually the
same Indium tin oxide coating is used on both the cupola and the
the Eva suit visor in order to to get thermal correct there.
So yeah, it's been been an amazing project and and journey
there and we're super excited to see this this suit come to life
during the Polaris on mission. The last thing we wanted to
touch on is just other crew training.
Sarah talked a lot about suspended training and and how
we've trained for the Eva. But there's a lot of other
aspects of this mission that we just walked through.
And curious kid, if you can touch on some of the other
training activities going into the austere environments that
you and the Crew have have done over the last couple of years.
Yeah, you bet. You know and we we kind of piled
on to to what NASA has done over generations as far as you know,
identifying environments and situations that are stressful
that we be able to deal with and learn not only strengthen
weaknesses of your teammates but learning about yourself and how
you handle those stressful situations.
So for example you know we've we've done SCUBA training we've
climbed several mountains we've done skydiving, we fly fighter
jets and and all these environments you know they they
induce a level of stress that allows us to get comfortable in
these uncomfortable scenarios. You know the fighter jets for
example Jared and I will send the front seat Nana and Sarah in
the back seat and and we're working together as a team going
through checklist procedures working on levels of trust,
flying in close proximity to each other in formation.
You know, you're strapped into this aircraft, you're dealing
with weather, all different types of scenarios and and it
just allows us these opportunities to get comfortable
together because these are similar situations that we're
going to experience on orbit and we got to be able to handle
these stressful environments. Climbing a mountain you're
you're on side of a mountain it takes days to get towards the
summit. You're dealing with dehydration,
lack of sleep, food's not that great and and you have this
opportunity to learn a lot about each other as well as yourself.
So those are some of the things that we've gone through the
centrifuge, the altitude chamber put us in in a similar
environment pulling G slightly different axis but similar
nonetheless. All to prepare us and and we've
done this over the last couple years, we've we've had some
great experiences and we're just looking forward to putting it to
to the real thing come launch. Thanks kid.
I wanted to pivot over to some QA.
We've pulled some questions off of X from the posts from earlier
today, and then I believe the moderators are gonna let certain
folks in to ask their questions live.
But to kick it off wanna start with the the pre breathe
protocol. So you obviously have to do a
pre breathe protocol before going down to lower pressure
pure oxygen in the space suit. Jerry, can you explain what the
pre breathe is going to look like on Polaris Dawn and and why
is it important to iterate on this and and make improvements
as we look towards the moon and Mars and and beyond?
Yeah, sure Stu. So I think best best way to
describe this is to think about a you know a can of soda, right.
So we have a lot of nitrogen in our system and you know
generally, generally speaking you add high pressure, you add
more of it then you go to low pressure, it can come out of
solution and that's what essentially creates like the
bends or if for those familiar with like diving or or even you
know worst scenarios. Now this is not something new
for our mission. You know this is had to have
been dealt with with high altitude flying like U2, Sr. 71
or certainly all the Evas on the International Space Station.
Now the difference though is, is that they they will often just
breathe 100% oxygen for a very prolonged period of time.
Or they can even do an exercise routine, you know, to try and
purge the nitrogen from their system, in which case you've
less concerned about experiencing, you know,
decompression sickness. Now the problem is we don't have
an airlock on dragon, so we can't just sit in there for
hours on end breathing 100% oxygen to to rid ourselves of
that that nitrogen. We have to take a different
approach to it and the way we do that over several days is we
lower the pressure in the vehicle very slowly and then we
compensate by increasing you know oxygen PPO two.
So you're really it's it's it's kind of like the equivalency of
maybe like going to Denver or visiting like a mountain town.
So it's not bad at all. But over that time period of
being at what what our body thinks, the higher elevation
we're slowly purging nitrogen from our system and then we will
switch to 100% O2 in our suits, you know for a period of time
when we are venting down the capsule and then we will conduct
the entire operation at 100% O2. So it's it is it is interesting
because in the long term goal like in the movies of being able
to throw on your your space suit and helmet and just run outside
and do an Eva you have to account for this and you know
this pre breathe protocol that we're working with could help
get us in a step in that direction if your entire mission
was essentially in that environment and then perhaps at
some point you could just put on a helmet with 100% O2 maybe go
outside in a in a similar manner.
So that's a pre breathe. We've tested this all on the
ground at a NASA chamber about a year and a half ago actually
under you know you know conditions that could that would
be like worse than what's expected to be encountered from
our pre breathe and Eva. Meaning that we have a bunch of
safety margin built on top of it and and we know it works pretty
well. Back to you, Stu.
Cool. Thanks Jared.
Yeah, lots of lots of modifications for that.
But obviously important when we get to the Moon and Mars, the
goal would be that zero pre breathe suit to be to be agile
on a different surface you have to just be able to put your suit
on and and go outside And we're excited to take a step towards
that with this previous protocol that works with the the Dragon
architecture. The next question is about the
visor. So I I briefly mentioned the
Indian tin oxide coating and how it was similar to what we used
on the cupola on inspiration for, but we had a question
earlier today about how it it looks tinted, it definitely
looks like an optical filter. Chris Trigg, can you walk us
through how that was selected and kind of the iteration to get
to the the current visor design? Yeah, sure.
So the visor is is serving a lot of functions.
It's helping to seal the suit and retain pressure.
It's obviously the optical porthole for the crew to see
outside. It has to manage the thermal
environment as well and then of course it also has to protect
just like a pair of sunglasses from preventing too much light
and and harmful wavelengths of light from from entering the
suit. So we reiterated a lot as Stu
mentioned kind of building on what had been developed for the
Cupola which shares a lot of this similar technical
challenges that was developed for inspiration for and the tint
of the visor is actually copper that is sputter deposited onto
the visor. So we got to that by iterating
through lots of different potential options looking at not
just the performance and making sure it met all of our
requirements, but also thinking forward to what is something
that we could scale economically in the future.
We have to go make a lot of these.
So that was something that you know throughout the suit design
we were thinking about and and this is one example where it
helped kind of drive us to where we got to with this copper coat
advisor. Awesome.
Wanna jump to some live questions?
I believe the first person will be Felix from space-time.
Are you let in? Seems like we're connecting
right now. All
right, Felix, looks like you're a speaker.
You wanna ask your question? How are you doing?
My name is Felix Gatfield with the Felix space-time YouTube
channel. So great to be able to talk to
the crew again. Once again, thank you for taking
my question. Creating a new space suit is no
small feat, so a huge congratulations to the SpaceX
team. As Jared said on X earlier
today, it took two plus years to get to this final product.
I'm guessing there were many iterations before you got to
this final refined product. What were some of the biggest
design challenges along the way? Thanks again.
I think that's a great question, Chris.
You want to start with that one. Yeah, sure.
I think one thing that makes all space hardware challenging and
certainly space suits too, is just the integrated nature of
the number of problems that you're trying to solve.
And so any one solution for a particular challenge may make
another challenge more difficult.
So the visor is a great example. You know you can adjust
attention of the visor to help your thermal considerations but
obviously that and then impairs the crew and their ability to
see what they need to see. So you're kind of trading that
back and forth. So I think the the challenge on
the suit was you know because we approached it from the idea that
like everything was fair game and we could go in and redesign
anything If it made sense to go redesign it from where we were
starting. There was you're often kind of
having to review all of the different kind of challenges
that you were up against and make sure that anyone solution
wasn't impacting the other one. Cool, yeah.
Thanks Trig. Maybe another question written
into X this morning. The space suit incorporates some
materials from Falcon and Dragon hardware furthering the
collaboration across the company required to to make this Eva
suit happen. Chris, can you quickly talk
through how it was working with those teams and and what
specifically were were utilizing from these other programs to to
make this soft good suit happen? Yeah, sure.
So you know, we're here in Hawthorne and it's pretty
remarkable how many teams are under one roof.
We build suits in the same building that we integrate
Dragon that we integrate Falcon. It's same building that we do
all of our Vibe and thermal testing of avionics.
So we have a lot of different resources at our disposal here,
which is great. There's some thermal material
that we ended up using on the boot, which was developed
actually for Falcon and Dragon. It's used on the inner stage on
Falcon and on the trunk of Dragon as well.
We were kind of iterating through different materials
trying to thread the needle of the thermal requirements while
being light enough to kind of wear and and easy to manufacture
with. And we actually the soup
production team is located right next to where they actually
integrate inner stages. So as a pretty funny story in
that one day we were kind of walking and saw some of this
material out and it needed to just like started talking to the
materials engineers on the inner stage team made some prototypes
and have now kind of gotten that material into the flight suits.
So we'll be using that on the boots.
Awesome. Thanks, Chris.
I believe we next wanted to bring in Will Robinson Smith and
we'll we'll bring him in to to ask a question.
All right. Hey, Will, can you hear us?
Yes, I can. And thanks for taking some of
our live questions. Really appreciate it.
No. Problem.
Wanted to ask about the development process specifically
with the wet versus dry testing you mentioned sort of
historically space suits go into a massive.
Pool like the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at JPL or the Johnson Space
Center. Was there a thought to do that
type of testing with this suit at some point down the road or
has that already been done? What's kind of the collaboration
with NASA and some of the the centers that you've been to?
Thanks. Yeah.
I think that's a great question. Jared, do you want to answer
that with some of the training and trades that we made early on
for EBA training? Sure.
And certainly welcome the rest of the crew to to chime in.
Look that's what I thought was going to happen day one.
Right now I was like this is just how you train for an Eva is
underwater. So SpaceX better start digging a
pool and you know good SpaceX fashion kind of zoomed out and
said you know is there a better way to go about doing this.
Like we certainly don't want to submerge our our good Dragon
simulator into a into a swimming pool and and we also need to
work quickly and learn quickly. So they developed as Sarah
mentioned before like the the Argos type system of using an
offloading hoist to replicate microgravity.
So we could conduct you know joint simulations and training
environments in our simulator and do Eva work you know
essentially at the same time without putting anything into a
into a swimming pool. And all that said there there's
been a ton of collaboration with NASA from like subject matter
expertise that have you know provided inputs.
We've we've had some NASA astronauts come out and observe
some of our Eva training to provide input.
We we that that pre breathe protocol that was tested in a a
pressure chamber over over 2 days that I mentioned before was
was that JSC and our ATP test. Which is kind of the, you know,
graduation exercise for these suits where we we go into a
thermal vac chamber. We'll also be at NASA.
So I I think, you know, as much as we've done, you know, scuba
training and you know, practice in that environment, it really
wasn't necessary for what we're trying to accomplish with this
suit. Yeah.
Thanks, Jared. I I think maybe another way to
think about it, to do underwater training, you actually have to
modify the suit to facilitate that.
You have to add mass to the suit to get it to truly neutral
buoyancy. You also have to flow gas at a
different flow rate because you're actually going to
positive pressure. You're going to higher than one
atmosphere versus just training in one atmosphere.
We can we can flow at the standard just ground training
that we use for pressurization and suit mobility testing.
So the the suspended training really was a a simplification
and we went into it with an open mind.
We want to make sure you know that you can test every single
aspect of the Eva and every single motion that the crew has
to make. And we created a checklist and
just like how you qualify a piece of metallic hardware by
pushing and pulling on it in each different direction.
We made sure we truly qualified the Eva operation and that we
can demonstrate margin with the the crew members doing the
actual translation and and hatch operations with with certain
pieces added on to make sure that when you actually get into
the the operation itself that we're we're super confident that
it will it will go as planned. Maybe to jump to to another pre
asked question from X earlier today.
Sarah, can you talk about how long will the spacewalk be and
and what sort of activities are you going to do during it?
Sure. So the kind of.
I don't know if this has been said explicitly, but the suits
themselves are fed by the vehicle.
So all of our life support is going to be coming from the
vehicle oxygen tanks inside the spacecraft fed.
They're an umbilical to our suits.
The umbilicals provide, you know, our electronics, our life
support and that that is really our connection to the vehicle.
We effectively have to fly all of those consumables.
And so in order to both account for the full mission duration
and make sure we can test this out, the operation is going to
be scoped to about two hours end to end and that includes venting
the capsule, external operations and then re pressurizing the
capsule as well. Outside the spacecraft, 2 crew
movers will go through the kind of like a test matrix
effectively to get SpaceX the data that they're hoping to see.
And this is looking at mobility movement in this microgravity
environment, how the suit is performing.
And there's a kind of a whole series of test questions that
will be stepped through for the time outside the spacecraft.
But it'll be kind of the first opportunity.
You know, we have this this ground validated system for
training, but we're also equally validating that training method
in the microgravity environment to see what we if there are
nuances we didn't quite capture in our simulated environment.
So getting all of that data to provide back to the SpaceX team
for for future Eva operations development and training.
Yeah, I think Sarah, that's a super important point.
The, the goal of this suit is to be our first design of the Eva
suit. And then just like all other
SpaceX products, we're going to continue through block upgrades
as we go forward and and learn. And so understanding the
similarity between space activities during the Eva and
ground training is very important because we want to
make sure that the the ground training is validated and we can
continue to make improvements and and block upgrades and and
be confident that they're going to scale correctly when you get
to a surface activity on the Moon or Mars or other
microgravity Evas in Earth orbit.
The next question is for Chris Trigg folks on X earlier today.
We're curious we we now have our IVA product and then the Eva
suit product. But is there a goal to make
these Eva suits the standard flight suit or or what does that
vision look like? Yeah.
So we definitely are working towards a point at which we kind
of have a single suit architecture that's capable of
all the things that SpaceX might want to do, you know wherever
those missions may go. And so currently as you you know
have we've been talking about we have this new combination EVAIVA
suit and then we have the standard suit but that we flag
on commercial commissions. But we are, we do plan to kind
of merge and those designs and incorporate all of the things
that we've learned in Eva suit development.
And in fact we've already started doing that as I think
our first mission was cruise 6 / a year ago now, where we
introduced some changes to the IBA suits based off of things
that we have learned and developed from the Eva suit
program. And so we've already been kind
of starting to do that and implement changes into our
standard IBA suits. Thanks, Chris.
The next question I wanted to go to Eric Burger, who is getting
let in right now. Hey, Eric, looks like you're in.
Can you hear us? Eric, can you hear us?
It looks like you're a speaker now.
All right. Maybe while we're waiting for
that, we can come back to Eric. We'll go to another question
from X from earlier today. Folks wanted to know about the
heads up display. What does the HUD look like?
Maybe Sarah, you can chat through what the the HUD looks
like and what information are you all going to be monitoring
during the EBA. Sure, yeah.
I think I just love the, I love the Hud's up display.
It's such a futuristic part of this suit, being able to have
situational awareness about what your suit is doing when you're
actually wearing it and outside the spacecraft there's some kind
of key pieces of telemetry we'll be looking at the the big and
most important one is obviously your suit pressure, so you have
insight into how it is performing if pressure is
holding and stable. And then there's some additional
supplementary information like the amount of time you've spent
on oxygen, so the timer keeping track of your your allocation
and as well as temperature data and humidity in your in your
suit. So it's it kind of sits below
your left jaw and it is, it's really cool.
You can still see the world through the visor and through
the the display itself, but then you have those pieces of of
information available to you when you need them.
And hey, maybe you just jump in again here is another awesome
opportunity to you know highlight the the SpaceX
performance here. You know Kit and I have flown
aircraft with with heads up displays in them and and also
you know sadly you know overseeing efforts to try and
upgrade aircraft with heads up displays and these are like 3
year efforts. So bear in mind the SpaceX team
built an Eva suit in less time than that.
But I I can tell you we we were in SpaceX leaving on a Friday.
We come back on a Monday, there's a heads up display in
the suits now. The first version of it that
didn't look anywhere here as sleek and refined as our current
flight hardware, but they did it in the weekend.
It was like a weekend project because they knew that we needed
this type of information so we did so we could have good
situational awareness when we're away from the displays and
needed insights into to the health of our our suits.
And they continue to iterate on it until it's what it is today.
But it's not hard to look out into the future and where this
is going. Will it incorporate, you know
checklist on more complex operations or Evas years from
now? We'll use augmented reality when
exploring, you know, perhaps another planet.
It's it's pretty exciting. You know the seeds were planted
not that long ago, and it's already, you know, with with
respect to these avionics integrations into the suit
already moving in such a cool direction.
Thanks Sharon. It looks like Eric Berger's back
in. Want to do a quick quick chom
check and we'll we'll let you ask your question.
Yeah. Hi, Can you hear me?
Yeah, we got you. Go ahead.
Great. Sorry about that.
I'm just wondering what the risk profile.
Is for Stuart, Jared on this. You're obviously going to a
higher altitudes, there's less debris, but your MMOD risk
probably presumably, but you're doing you know venting and Eva.
So I'm just curious like you know when you compare this to
flights to the space station, you know, is this a higher risk
mission is about the same, is it less?
Just curious about your thoughts on that.
Yeah, Jared, do you want to start with that And then I'll,
I'll fill in after. Yeah, I I mean Eric it's a good
question. I mean it's a different risk and
it's it's a different risk going returning to the moon.
It's a different risk going to Mars.
I mean it's kind of the point you know we've we've gotten
really comfortable going from from point A to B to an
extraordinary not you know floating international
laboratory but I think humankind's ambitions are are
beyond that. So for sure like we're going to
encounter different things than what we've had for, you know, up
till now there is far greater mmod risk, you know at 1000
kilometers for example, and there is, you know, 400
kilometers. But then there's an awful lot
less of it when we start getting out there even even farther.
Certainly the risk is different when you vent the vehicle down
to vacuum and you're in a space suit than when when you're not.
But I think these are all like positive steps and you know
again in the direction of goodness towards, you know
humankind's interest to explore our solar system and beyond.
So what what I'd say is like the SpaceX team is incredibly aware
of these risks. You know you got 15,000 really
bright people all focused on a common vision and and they know
any missteps along the way can can delay that that grand goal.
So we certainly are briefed constantly on where the
differences are between our mission and normal profile feel
really comfortable they're they've been addressed.
Yeah Jared I I agree. So maybe quantitatively to
answer your question we assess total radiation exposure.
We assess total MMOD risk throughout the mission profile
and it specifically looks at the orbit you're in, the apogee, the
perigee, the semi major axis, what beta angle you're at, the
pointing mode of the Dragon spacecraft and and we make sure
it's within our risk tolerance. And so the Polaris Don mission
for both of those will be within the risk that we accept for a
six month ISS mission and that's important to us.
We want to make sure we're not unnecessarily taking risks, but
you do have to expand the envelope and and do it
methodically and that's exactly the purpose of this mission.
Here I will say maybe one anecdote.
Venting the capsule down to vacuum as as Sarah mentioned, is
something only planned in a contingency for the original
Dragon spacecraft design and and we've made modifications to
facilitate that for Polaris Dawn.
But one thing that we did last month was we sent the capsule to
a vacuum chamber. We vented the vacuum chamber
down and then vented Dragon through its vent system that it
will use on orbit during the mission.
Prior to the Eva, we sat there at vacuum for an hour to
represent the time of the Eva. We were flowing pure oxygen
through 4 space suit simulators and then pressurized the capsule
back up using the flight repressurization system, the
oxygen and and new nitrogen repress system as Sarah
described and that all worked as expected.
The team got great data and the way we were thinking about that
is that's equivalent to the uncrewed demo one flight that
occurred before the crude Demo 2 flight.
We want to make sure we do the full scale end to end test
before exposing the crew to those conditions and and
ultimately the successful test gives us the confidence we need
to to step into the mission. All right, that's all we wanted
to cover for the QA. Maybe one last question for each
of the crew members. I'd like to go kind of 1 by 1
and just let folks know what's the aspect of the mission you're
most excited for. And maybe we'll start with Anna.
Thanks Stu. Just first wanted to say thanks
everybody for joining today. There is so much on this mission
that I'm excited for. We have 5 action-packed days and
hope to learn a tremendous amount to bring back to SpaceX
and and make future astronauts lives better.
But I think one one of the many moments that I think stands out
to me is an opportunity that I will have to read a book to my
two kids from space as well as some of the brave patients of
Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital.
This book is raising money for the hospital and and I think it
will be just a connection moment between our beautiful Earth and
our crew in space that I will cherish and really remember all.
Right. Maybe.
Jared, what are you most excited for?
Yeah, sure. I I have to tell you, I mean I'm
like like like Anna mentioned like we have so much exciting
stuff that we're looking to accomplish.
But for me particularly I'm really excited to see the
reaction on my crew members faces when we when we arrive
into orbit. I'm going with three like
incredible human beings that have worked so hard throughout
their lives to to get to this, to get to this moment.
And I know what a special feeling it is when you when that
engine cuts off and and you have arrived.
And this time I'm going to be paying particular attention to
my crew mates next to me just to take in that awesome moment.
Thanks. Jared, how about Sarah next?
I think I I completely agree with Anna and Jared with so many
moments to capture. You know, I I think it is
incredible to see what Starlink can do for the world with
respect to connectivity, seeing some of the hospitals we've been
connecting around the world for Saint Jude to bring their
treatments, you know, to so many more kids around the globe is
incredible. And the ability to, you know,
use this network for such good. I'm really excited for getting
to see what this can do for vehicles in space.
You can kind of change functionality entirely for how
you communicate with spacecraft with this this high bandwidth
capacity. So I'm I think I'm personally
really excited to share some some moments from orbit with you
guys over that compact. Thanks, Sarah.
Ted, what are you most excited about?
Man, I I struggle with this question every time we get asked
because there's so many awesome dynamic aspects of this mission
that that we're all looking forward to.
You know with 20 years of flying fighters I'm I'm definitely
looking forward to the launch itself going from 1G and 0 knots
to 17,500 miles an hour. And you know seeing what the
Earth looks like especially at those lower perigee's cruising
along and then seeing the Earth from 1400 kilometers and then
you know just just seeing what Starlink is going to provide via
communication. We've been using ground based
facilities and teacher satellites for so long we we got
high expectations for what Starlink can bring to the fight.
And then lastly, you know the the, the reentry and splashdown
and and reuniting with families, they've sacrificed so much over
the last couple years and we definitely couldn't do it
without the support of family and friends and the and the
Polaris team and obviously all the dedicated men and women of
SpaceX. So it's going to be a great
journey that we're going to share with the public.
Awesome. Thanks kid.
Well that wraps it up for today. I really appreciate everyone for
calling in. We we love the support.
We obviously love what we do here at SpaceX and and working
on the Polaris Don mission here and it's just exciting to
release the Eva suit and talk about the mission and the suit
design with all of you live. It makes everything worth it to
have moments like this and then get ready for the mission and
for sure go make history with this ambitious mission.
The Dragon spacecraft for this flight is currently in Florida.
It's going through its pre launch processing phase and and
the hardware is moving forward and on track for that early
summer launch. Really wanted to thank the
Polaris on crew, Chris Trig everyone from the SpaceX side
for for joining and talking through this today.
And yeah, overall, really excited to make history for the
Polaris program. Take a huge step for SpaceX and
the industry as a whole. Thanks everyone for calling in.
Thank you.