Sol-X is designing and building the world’s first commercial space diving suit.

The RL Mark VI is intended to operate on Earth, low Earth orbit, and long range space missions. This suit will increase safety and productivity on manned space missions, provide a means of escape from possibly disastrous in-orbit emergencies, create new recreational thrills for adrenaline junkies and empower space tourism and scientific exploration. Sol-X’s RL MARK VI features include:

i. A customized version of Final Frontier Design’s low-cost Intra-Vehicular Activity IVA 3G spacesuit, which was designed by a 20-year NASA veteran. It makes use of Aerogel’s lightweight and Space Shuttle-like flexible insulation blankets to form a protective thermal layer. The suit system can be turned on and off, control built-in suit and light systems, maintain radio contact with ground control, and utilize its trajectory data systems.

ii. Augmented reality (AR) goggles -made byspace company Juxtopia- display a continuous stream of vital information to keep space divers on course and within safety parameters throughout the jump. Real-time dynamic analytics include:
-current altitude
-elevation
-acceleration / deceleration
-internal / external temperatures
-heart rate
-GPS location
-FAA radar’s local airspace data & trajectory data.

iii. Power gloves that control signals within the suit. Functionality is made possible with our Gravity Development Board (GDB), a proprietary open-source hardware designed to serve as an interface between MARK VI’s critical systems and components.

iv. Gyroscopic boots, which are controlled by the power gloves, perform two essential functions. The first is to manipulate positional orientation during descent while the gyroscopic thruster boots stabilize the diver for a vertical landing. Gyros maintain optimal altitude during descent because we understand there are no aerodynamic forces acting upon a diver to assist in stabilization.

v. A warning system to anticipate threats and warn the diver of malfunctions preventing a safe landing. In anticipation of potential malfunctions, two fail-safes -one being a parachute- provide the diver with the opportunity to bail out. The other is a ‘flat spin compensator’ that comes online in the event a diver loses altitude control for greater than an allotted five seconds. As a diver nears Earth’s surface, mini aerospike thrusters built into the boots ensure a seamless vertical landing--without using a parachute.

The space suit and augmented reality goggle technology is manufactured by our partners and the Gravity Development Board will be manufactured by Sol-X. We expect the first iterations of our product to cost $25,000.

Sol-X developers operate in the present but always maintain our vision on tomorrow’s horizon to create a system that requires small changes to evolve with the users’ requirements. Beyond the scope of the current project, this technology has a number of potential commercial applications: Enabling space settlements on foreign worlds, providing humanitarian aid workers means of access to remote or inaccessible areas, enhancing military personnel safety or use in the entertainment industry for movies or live shows.