Once again, helium is a recurring theme
with these space issues. Yeah, Helium is prone to leaking and it
is a small molecule so it can find its way out of various small crevices.
But this is just comes with the territory of following rockets and
rocket launches. There's always some kind of delay, but
hopefully it won't be too lengthy for and hopefully we'll see this launch take
off soon. They basically have a backup window
every morning at the same time, right the way through the weekend.
So I imagine it will go off. A big part of this is not necessarily
the crew of Polaris, Dawn, it's the spacesuits.
And you wrote about that last week in the business space newsletter.
Like and subscribe. Tell me about the spacesuits and why
they're so key to that, too. What's due to take place in the mission?
Yeah, So for people who have followed spacesuits up until now, you might be
familiar with Space X's so called spacesuits, but the spacesuits that
we've seen up until this point are really just pressure suits which are
used by the astronauts. They're worn when they fly to space,
when they come back from space, and they're really mostly meant to be used
in the case of an emergency in case the capsule depressurized or there's some
unforeseen event. But Space X built for this specific
purpose is a spacewalking spacesuit, and it's really meant to be used for this
exact reason for being able to leave the vehicle, perform repairs on the outside
of a spacecraft for this mission. Space X is just going to test out the
durability of the suits. But these suits look pretty cool.
They definitely look like the sleek white design of the pressure suits that
we've seen, but they're supposed to be able to withstand the vacuum of space.
Even better, they have heads up displays inside of them and they you know, they
have the signature space exile that we've all come to know and love.
I mean, absolutely fascinating as to whether or not we're going to be
investing in. I mean, the new way in which we see the
suits involved. Loren Edwards, just tell it, talking us
through the fact that we're going to be seeing a new launch window every single
day. But ultimately, how quickly can things
like Helium leak be recovered from? It's hard to speculate on this.
I think when it comes to Space X, I am always amazed at how quickly they're
able to kind of turn things around. If you recall, you know, about a month
ago, they had a failure with their Falcon nine rocket while launching some
StarLink satellites, and they were able to get back to launch within just a
couple of weeks. So Space X is definitely garnered a lot
of experience by launching so frequently.
So it may be something that is easy to to to fix with this particular mission.
I don't think Space X wants to be taking any chances.
It's probably one of their missions that they've done to date.
They'll be going to a much higher altitude than astronauts have gone to in
a very long time. So I think they just want to make sure
everything is buttoned up so it's possible they might take some extra care
with this particular helium leak. I mean, I mean, there is risk in this
mission, 700 kilometer altitude approximately for the spacewalk.
Only two of them will do it. And what I find so amazing is like the
crew's in quarantine basically right now.
And yet Jared Isaacman is on Twitter or X saying, oh, don't worry, we know
exactly what's going on. We're talking with Space X.
He's kind of key to this because he went on Inspiration4 as well.
Yeah. Jared Isaacman has definitely become an
interesting space X figure. He is bankrolled the development of this
program and also helped to fund this flight.
And it's not he'll be flying again in the future to it.
He didn't just buy this one flight. He has kind of invested in an entire
program, a research and development program called Polaris, and this is just
the first part of that. It'll eventually culminate with the
first crewed launch of SpaceX's Starship Rocket, which is that massive vehicle
that they've been building in South Texas.
I assume that Jared will be on that as well.
We'll have to wait and see that because we still have some development road to
get through. But yeah, he's definitely become a
dominant figure in the space community.