Created by the Hollywood costume designer behind Batmans’ iconic rubber six-pack,
SpaceX’s snazzy new spacesuit pairs the bold lines of a couture tuxedo with the utopian
optimism of vintage sci-fi.
How did they make it so trim?
And is it really the same suit Elon Musk blasted into the inky void behind the wheel of his
cherry-red Tesla roadster?
Join us today as we model the ultimate in wearable tech and learn what’s so special
about SpaceX’s Astronaut Suit.
Back in May of last year veteran NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken blasted off from
Florida in a test flight to the International Space Station.
Not only were they making history, in their private sector SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule
atop a SpaceX Falcon9 rocket.
The pair also made the journey kitted out in matching SpaceX spacesuits.
Despite looking a little like off-brand Stormtroopers, or The Stig from Top Gear, Bob and Doug were
nonetheless full of praise for their groovy new hi-tech threads.
‘We’d give the suits a five-star rating,’ gushed Bob Behnken.
‘They’re much easier to get in and out of in Zero-G,’ added Doug Hurley.
Both happily confirmed the new SpaceX suits were vastly superior to the bulky orange ‘pumpkin’
jobs that were in favor during their heyday on the Shuttle program.
So what are these new SpaceX spacesuits actually for?
It’s important to clarify nobody will be performing a spacewalk in one any time soon.
They’re strictly for wear during rocket launches and landings, in order to avoid the
awful tragedy that befell three cosmonauts on the 1971 Russian Soyuz 11 mission.
Those cosmonauts – Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev – all perished
in mid-flight when Soyuz disastrously decompressed 168km above sea level.
So these new suits are designed to serve as emergency bubbles of earth-like pressure in
just such a crisis.
They’ve been rigorously tested, says SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, in what he calls ‘double
vacuum pressure’, with astronauts inside.
‘We can put on suits and go through a scenario where the suits are going to inflate,’ Bob
Behnken says.
Benken is at pains to point out that no such training was as available with the old-school
pumpkin suits.
‘That level of training,’ adds an impressed Doug Hurley.
‘Versus PowerPoints and virtual presentations are really important.
It’s a huge win.’
As well as keeping astronauts alive in an emergency decompression scenario, these new
suites are flame-proof and designed to keep the occupants cool using piped-in airflow.
This cooling air, and gases for that all-important pressurization, are piped in through the astronaut's
chair, which was designed in tandem with the suit so both pieces of kit are fully simpatico.
Connection to the suit itself happens via an umbilical cord that joins discreetly at
the thigh.
Electrical and communication cables also enter the suit at this point.
The new space helmet protects wearers from the fearsome many-decibels racket of the engine
and also houses microphones and speakers in order to facilitate clear two-way communications
between the crew and mission control on the ground.
The sophisticated helmet which is 3D printed to order, also houses nifty mechanisms which
control visor retraction and locking as well as the necessary gas valves.
Those smart gloves aren’t just capable of maintaining healthy ambient pressure across
the astronaut’s precious hands.
They’re optimized for use on the Dragon Capsule’s onboard touchscreens.
So our astronauts are happy and safe from calamity.
It’s light, too – 40% lighter than previous spacesuits.
But that isn’t what makes them truly special.
‘It’s designed to keep the crew safe,’ says mission director Benji Reed obviously
enough.
However, she adds, ‘…it’s important the suits are also inspiring’
To realize this inspirational vision, Elon Musk and his team looked beyond the more usual
bland space-hardware contractors.
Instead, they enlisted a little help from the world of show business.
Jose Fernandez is a leading Hollywood costume designer.
His work has been worn by big-screen superstars from Wolverine to Wonder-Woman, Spiderman
to The Avengers, The X-Men to Captain America, and more.
So famous is Jose, it’s said., in fact, he claims when first asked to work on the
SpaceX suits in 2016 he didn’t know about the work of a small-time industrialist Elon
Musk.
“I didn’t even know what SpaceX was,’ remembers Fernandez of the unusual commission
he received in 2016.
Fernandez spent several months drafting and redrafting designs with his new SpaceX boss.
Musk, unconventional as ever, insisted Fernandez take his initial cues from the world of formalwear.
‘He kept saying “anybody looks better in a tux, no matter what size or shape they
are,” says Fernandez.
So the goal was to make a spacesuit looking less like a pumpkin and more akin to glossy
evening duds.
No easy task.
‘It’s incredibly hard to balance aesthetics and function,’ Musk says of this process.
‘It’s easy to do either separately.
‘You see spacesuits in the movies — they look good, they don't work well.
‘You can make a spacesuit that works, but it doesn't look good, because fundamentally
it's a pressure suit that has to survive in a vacuum.’
So how did they pull it off?
The flanks of these new SpaceX suits are lent definition with subtly darker panels that
create a tapering effect, molding the astronaut's torso into a more fetching form.
Kind of like a tux.
Add to that masculine squared-off shoulders, sleek seams running from collarbone to knee,
and the retro-superhero charm of knee-high boots, and you begin to see how these might
one day turn heads on the launch pad.
So slim is the finished suit, indeed Musk was forced to issue a clarification that it’s
actually real, and not a mere mockup.
‘It definitely works,’ he insisted.
‘You can just jump in a vacuum chamber with it.
It's fine."
SpaceX Suits and Crew Equipment Manager Chris Trigg – himself a former Disney Imagineer
– compares the new-look suits favorably to those bulky old NASA jobs.
‘One of the things that’s cool about the suit is it’s not just a piece of hardware,’
said Trigg in an official video.
’It’s not just a suit.
It’s a personal thing.
It’s Bob’s suit.
It’s Doug’s suit.’
Both suits are indeed tailored specifically to the astronauts for the ultimate fit and
comfort.
They were made in-house at SpaceX Hawthorne manufacturing facility, alongside SpaceX rockets
and capsules.
You might well ask what’s the point of making them stylish at all.
Musk insisted Jose design the suit with aesthetics foremost on his mind – they later worked
together figuring out how to reverse engineer the design in order to make it fit for duty.
But when you look into it, the iconography of space suits has always been somewhat a
matter of aesthetics.
If nothing else, they’re a great way of expressing a nation’s distinctive vision
of the future, manifested in a suit that’s admired by millions.
Academics point to the suits deployed on NASA’s pioneering Mercury missions as stellar examples
of this process at work.
The initial idea was to make them in military green, but instead, designers opted for silver.
Why?
While silver’s reflective properties were maybe a minor factor, it’s been said they
went with silver mainly just because silver looks so awesome and futuristic.
Naturally, in the bold new 21st-century context of commercial space travel, image and branding
matter more than ever.
Richard Branson, for instance, has enlisted the help of fashion brand Under Armour to
design space-worthy attire for his Virgin Galactic space program.
Inspiring the next generation of astronauts is a priority for anybody interested in the
future of space travel.
According to celebrated spaceman Doug Hurley:
“The biggest testament is my 10-year-old son telling me how cool I am now,” Hurley
told The Associated Press after wearing his suit for the big launch.
Speaking of cool, one of SpaceX’s suits is right now looping around the sun in Elon’s
old cherry-red Roadster.
That suit, aka Starman, is real, by the way, not a mock-up.
Although Starman’s umbilical thigh connection isn’t connected, so it won’t inflate.
Weird.
You’d think being named after a David Bowie song they’d make it under pressure.
What do you think?
Is styling a worthwhile consideration for modern-day space programs?
Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to subscribe for more high fashion tech content.