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An Open Source, DIY Spacesuit Is About To Get Its First Life Or Death Test (reddit.com)
dmoberhaus writes: Pacific Spaceflight is a small group of volunteers that has spent the last decade developing an open source, DIY spacesuit in their members' living rooms. This fall its creator will fly to over 60,000 feet in a hot air balloon, known as the Armstrong Limit, the point at which exposed body fluids will boil away if not protected in a pressured vessel. [A post on Medium provides a] deep dive into the story of Pacific Spaceflight and how to build your own spacesuit. Here is an excerpt from the report: There are two main types of spacesuits: Intravehicular activity (IVA) suits worn inside spacecraft, and those worn outside for extravehicular activities (EVA). IVA spacesuits are mostly there as a backup in case of an emergency, like the sudden loss of pressure in a spacecraft. This makes them inherently simpler since they don't have to account for things like radiation exposure and the gloves can just be rubber gloves similar to those you might use to wash your dishes. [...] Smith's first suits were made by modifying old scuba diving suits to fit his needs. Yet as he became more familiar with pressure suit design and his own requirements, he started to assemble everything from scratch. These days, he and the other Pacific Spaceflight volunteers cut their own fabric and pretty much make everything on their own or repurpose common household items as necessary (Smith said one of the few things the group can't make on its own is the suit's zippers). Smith will release the designs of the spacesuit as an open source blueprint once the suit is perfected and properly tested. The final version will reportedly cost less than $1,000 of materials to build.
Why risk your life like this? Seems like insanity to me.
enough said
Staying backwardian is a choice you don't have to stick with.
Beware the wormfaces!
I hate closed-source garments. I worry constantly about the security vulnerabilities that might be lurking in my shoes.
Stop putting up Medium links?
I've gotten totally over the incessant nagging
Copying from everything NASA has learned over the years is a bit easier than coming up with everything for the first time.
That said, when you're spending other people's money, taxpayer money, some people tend to be much less frugal than when they are spending their own money. NASA, like nearly all government, has certainly had some wasteful spending.
'I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.'
Attributed to John Glenn
In this case, you're you own bidder and buyer. And implementer. And user. At least you're really getting into your project.
How LOW can you GO? -- Darwin
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
From the article: "Space doesn't belong to the military industrial complex," Smith told me. "It belongs to humanity, it belongs to anyone who wants to go there. There's an extreme frustration in me that there's an entire universe out there to explore and the only way to get there is through these existing systems, these highly formalized systems that don't have a whole lot of incentive to make it easy to get there right now. I think that's a good enough reason to try this."
Nice to see some steps towards what we encouraged in 2001:
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."
Kind of difficult sometimes to see how much design culture has changed since then one day at a time -- but it has (e.g. see also the other slashdot story from today on the move to open RISC-V cores...)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I see where I can pay to wear their suits, I see data from tests of their suits, I see pictures of their suits, but I do NOT see data on how to build my own suit... Not that I need to, but I'd love to see the technical information behind all this. So again, how is this open source? Did I miss a link hiding somewhere?
I am sure that there must be some kind of flat earther funding in this.