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.