Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/24/elon-musk-posts-image-of-worki.html
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please 'splain: “double vacuum pressure”
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Space toilet for the uninitiated.
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I and lots of others also had this question. Apparently it has to do with the internal pressure of the suit, not the exterior pressure. I’m still unclear on the specifics.
My guess is that he meant that it was inflated such that the difference between the internal and external pressure was twice what the operating pressure would be with respect to vacuum.
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Has someone reversed the image or is the US flag backwards?
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No. The stars are ALWAYS TO THE FRONT on a uniform. So it would be looking ‘normal’ on the other side.
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Well, I’d never heard that before! I like that factoid.Thanks
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That’s what I took it to mean. If it can maintain a 3atm pressure in a 1atm environment then that suggests it should easily maintain a 1atm pressure in a vacuum.
Next time, please bring in Daft Punk for a design meeting. Or for the flight.
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It doesn’t look like it would be easy to swivel your head to the side in this. The helmet looks too small to get much motion within it (as one does in current suits) and there doesn’t look like there is ring at the neck to allow one to easily turn the helmet. I also don’t see any reinforcements or cables to help to keep the helmet from being pushed upwards when under pressure.
Esthetics. Because you wouldn’t want to go into space looking like the 8th grade Chess Club president.
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Yeah. Like Neil Armstrong didn’t look cool enough because the engineers at ILC Dover didn’t spend enough effort on aesthetics.* ISTM that a friggin’ SPACE SUIT is automaticallyf cool. Whatever the functional design ends up looking like will be the very definition space age cool. Putting effort into making it look like a costume designer’s IDEA of what a space suit looks like isn’t just a waste of time, it is counterproductive. All this seems to be missing is a set of LEDs on the inside of the helmet to light up his face so that you can SEE him acting.
But putting as much effort into how things look as into how well the work does seem like the Musk way…
*It’s not like they couldn’t have found anybody who worked on the aesthetics of clothing, it was a division of Playtex at the time.
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Did anyone else’s mind go here?
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Although NASA EVA suits, for instance, are only pressurized to ~4 psi or so of pure O2, so you have plenty to breathe, but the partial pressure is a lot lower and so the suit doesn’t go nearly all Michelin-man on you.
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