SpaceX Hired a Superhero Suit Designer to Create Its Upcoming Spacesuit

As reported by Popular Mechanics: Jose Fernandez is the founder and lead designer at Ironhead Studios, the company responsible for designing numerous superhero suits for the big screen. The studio has tackled Spiderman,Thor, and most recently, Batman. But the next big suit with Ironhead's touch sounds like it'll be for real-life spacemen. Namely, the ones that will work for our real-life Tony Stark, Elon Musk.

In an interview with Tested, Fernandez offhandedly mentioned his work for SpaceX. "I designed a spacesuit for SpaceX," Fernandez says, at the end of a clip highlighted by a Redditor on the subreddit devoted to the private spaceflight company. "I can't show [it], but they're gonna reveal it in the next possible year."

As another Redditor was quick to point out, this isn't the first time Frenandez mentioned the project, just the first time anyone really picked up on it. In an interview with BLEEP magazine earlier this year, Fernandez went into deeper detail about the project, perhaps most interestingly about how concerned Musk was with the suit's style, and how the suit was first designed to look awesome and then was (or is still in the process of being) reverse-engineered from there.

As Fernandez told BLEEP:

"I worked with [Musk] for six months and at the end of that, we created a suit that they are now reverse-engineering to make functional for flight. The look they are going to unveil in the next few months is something we created here in the studio. He wanted it to look stylish. It had to be practical but also needed to look great. It's pretty bad ass. He kept saying, "Anyone looks better in a tux, no matter what size or shape they are," and when people put this space suit on, he wants them to look better than they did without it, like a tux. You look heroic in it. It's an iconic thing be a part of."

It's a priority Musk has stressed before, and considering the sort of delightful but cartoonish look of NASA's upcoming suits, it seems like Musk should have plenty of room to edge in the SpaceX suit as "the cool one." Until the actual reveal, we'll just have to guess at how it might look, but lets just say the bar is looking pretty high.

SpaceX teased the new suit in a Crew Dragon conceptual video last year; though there's no guarantee that Frenandez's suit will look anything like what you've seen so far:

Whatever's happening, this won't be an easy task. Spacesuits have understandably stricter demands for comfort, durability and safety -- a ripped, damaged, or malfunctioning suit in space can do a lot more than ruin a day of filming.