Space Fashion: The Final Frontier
Have space suit, will travel. On Thursday morning, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of payments company Shift4 Payments, took the first commercial space walk as part of the Polaris Dawn mission, in collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He looked extremely cool doing it.
That’s not just because everyone looks cool in space. Isaacman took the spacewalk in an Extravehicular Activity Suit, a brand new space suit developed over the last two and a half years by SpaceX as part of a project to create the sort of comparatively low-cost space suits that could one day be worn by humans on missions to other planets.
A typical NASA space suit costs between $15 and 22 million, according to Popular Mechanics, and NASA has spent more than $600 million developing suits over the years. These aren’t exactly quick-to-make, mass-market products.
Humans aren’t going to colonize the moon or Mars with what amounts to high-priced custom couture. With the new suits, SpaceX’s long-term goal is essentially to transform the space suit business into something resembling fast fashion.
“Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require millions of space suits,” reads a caption on a SpaceX YouTube video showing off the new suits earlier this year. “The development of this suit and the execution of the spacewalk will be important steps toward a scalable design for space suits on future long-duration missions as life becomes multiplanetary.”
Isaacman echoed the idea. “We need space suits,” he told CNN. “And, you know, they shouldn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We need tens of thousands of them someday.”
The new suits boast fancy features and materials, providing what the company says is “greater mobility, a state-of-the-art helmet heads-up display (HUD) and camera, new thermal management textiles, and materials borrowed” from the company’s rocket capsule program.
Importantly, they also look awesome.
You might think this is a silly observation. And fans of strictly utilitarian clothing may not care.
But Musk seems to understand that making space travel look chic and exciting is important for generating the enthusiasm, and the will, to make risky, expensive space travel ventures happen. Engineering is obviously important—especially when your suit is the only thing protecting you from the icy vacuum of outer space—but so is marketing.
If you’re going to hang out in the great cosmic void, why not look cool doing it? Space fashion: It’s truly the final frontier.
AI Chatbots Doing Math
Speaking of new frontiers, OpenAI, which makes the ChatGPT AI, released yet another version of its large language model yesterday. And unlike your old Barbie doll, this one can do math.
Up until now, GPT-style AI tools have tended to struggle even with fairly straightforward math problems.
Sure, ChatGPT could write you a college-level essay on Dante. (Here’s the opener it just gave me: “Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is not just a journey through the afterlife; it’s a journey through the human soul, revealing the eternal consequences of our earthly actions.” Better get an A for that one.)
But calculus? Well, that was another story. As an English major, this is by far the most relatable thing about ChatGPT.
The new model, named OpenAI o1, was designed to be good at reasoning through complex, multi-step tasks and problems, including acrostics and difficult medical diagnoses.
That might mean somewhat slower responses: ChatGPT typically responds to a query instantly, but OpenAI says the new model “thinks before it answers,” and thus “can produce a long internal chain of thought before responding to the user.”
Up until now, in other words, LLMs have been motormouths. But the new model is the pensive type.
It’s always the quiet ones you have to worry about.
