Thursday, September 12, 2024

Civilian space walks!

SpaceX continues to do some surprising things.  They are, of course, in the money making business, with an eye on the future. They have starlink satellites that provide service. They launch satellites for companies, nations, and even small groups of people.  And they have contracts with NASA to go beyond that.

And sometimes, they act like their competitors, and launch people into space for civilian space travel.  

This past week, they launched a Polaris mission with a few paying customers, and they gave one of them - and a SpaceX engineer - an opportunity to open the Dragon capsule and step out into space.

On September 12th, they successfully did just that. Each of them was in space for a few minutes.  It was remarkably cool.  But more than that, SpaceX has been working on a lighter weight space suit that allows for more mobility than what NASA has ever had.  And on this space walk, they got to test them out.

In effect, someone was paying to field test all of their R&D work.


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