It took a looooong time to come up with this little beauty. There used to be a wide variety of connections for the differing nations and port authorities before this standard was adopted. Insurance companies can sometimes be your friends.
International Ship to Shore Fire Connection.
There is nothing inherently dangerous in reentry without a spacesuit — as long as nothing goes wrong.
Of course things can go wrong. Space is a very unforgiving environment, actively hostile to life. Just ask the crew of Soyuz 11. Oh wait, you can’t.
Yeah electrical outlets in the United States have been standardized since the 1930s (with updated standards for grounded outlets in the 1960s) and that hasn’t hampered innovation for electrical devices. Likewise, I can buy all manner of different air compressor attachments from different companies that still connect using the same kinds of pressure connectors.
Crew Dragon (or Starliner) doesn’t have an airlock, so when it comes to spacesuits it’s “everyone or no one”.
An Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) that has its own fully independent life support system, waste management, communications suite, power and whatnot and is good for EVAs that last a couple of hours (plus safety margin), it is not only functionally a miniature spacecraft in its own right, but also rather bulky.
Because EMUs are that complex, they are usually designed as “one size fits most” so they can be used by various people, like on the ISS.
Crew Dragon isn’t designed to carry 4 (let alone 7) of those in the capsule. Suiting up inside the capsule would be a challenge. I’m not even sure an EMU with all the bells and whistles would fit through the hatch.
The capsule is designed to shuttle astronauts to and from the ISS. That’s the mission profile.
For this, an IVA (intravehicular activity) pressure suit is quite enough as a safety measure in case the capsule loses pressure.
The suit is hooked up the the life support systems of the capsule. It’s not just the connections that need to be compatible, it’s everything from the software that controls the systems to the specific air mix (pure oxygen or not) and the pressure, power supply, communication systems.
If this doesn’t work properly decompression sickness is a real risk.
SpaceX’s new suit for the Polaris Dawn fight next week is an IEVA (intra/extravehicular activity) suit. A compromise between an IVA and an EMU; a modern version of the suits from the Gemini and Voskhod missions if you will. Extra protection against radiation and micrometeorites, but no autonomous life support. Good enough for popping out for a short while on a tether, not good enough for doing manual work outside for a couple of hours.
To make this work, every suit is individually tailored.
All of this. The suit is effectively part of the space craft. Even if we see people put it on outside the craft, get in, and then sit down.
For people who don’t operate space craft, a “suit” is something you put on that exists on it’s own. Even something like a race car driver suit (unless they’re way more advanced these days), that is closer to something people can relate to.
Nobody would question for a second that you cannot simply take a part from an F-150 truck and exchange it with a part from a Malibu and that it would “just work”. The space suit is more like that and less like the Brooks Brothers thing in the closet.
As is the docking system. Which has been standardized not just on American spacecraft made by different manufacturers but also on spacecraft and modules built by other countries.
There are lots of standardized parts that work across different automobiles, even automobiles built by different manufacturers. For example, a Ford F-150 and a Chevy Malibu are both capable of towing a trailer if equipped with a standard tow hitch and electrical connection, and both are designed to connect to an OBD II code reader.
We’re talking about purpose-built vehicles built to service a single client. There’s no reason NASA couldn’t make “let’s use a single suit connection standard” part of the contract requirements.
“Raw-dogging re-entry” is not as much fun and even riskier than it sounds.
Also, can that phrase die in a fire already… “raw dogging”… gag…
It’s so standardised that there are four incompatible docking systems being used on the ISS.
There’s presumably a standards document somewhere that describes these four different incompatible docking systems. People who build spacecraft get to pick one. Job done.
(The ISS presumably needed to accommodate both the Space Shuttle and the Russian Soyuz and Progress capsules, and it is clearly a lot easier to simply add two different types of door than getting the US to change their system to follow the Russians’, or the Russians to give up theirs in favour of the US version – as a matter of principle and national pride more than technology.)
There’s that whole wikipedia article that I linked to upthread, but the jist of it is that all the spacecraft from different manufacturers moving forward are being built to the International Docking Standard, and some of the older ports on the ISS have received adapters to make them compatible with this new standard.
I have this on my desk to remind me every time I am creating a new procedure or documenting existing ones.
Yes there is. It’s called the Commercial Crew Program.
You know, cut all that government red tape because private enterprises always come up with the best solutions.
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