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Apparently there are 27 different subcontractors for the current Artemis suit.

I still want to see SpaceX make an Iron Man spacesuit. A flexible airtight undersuit next to the skin and a lightweight, open-gap titanium exoskeleton that provides MMOD protection and prevents the undersuit from ballooning.

I have yet to see any reason why it wouldn’t work. 

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5 hours ago, CastleKSide said:


Its true there really isnt a target market for launches on the scale Starship hopefully will allow. Falcon/Falcon heavy seem like they would be capable of vacuuming all of the "orbital launch market" into the hands of SpaceX if they focused on that. This is of course ignoring the catchup factor. I expect F9 will have competition at some point and there is a good chance they will find ways of iterating on the "barge landing" model that (may) be able to undercut SpaceX. Industry leaders never stay on top for long if they aren't innovating themselves to maintain their lead. I have always seen the speed and force behind Starships development as that private company mindset of not resting on your laurels applied to a sector that never has seen it before.

Thats a side point however. If i recall past criticisms, I think the point you are trying to make is that it doesnt matter how advanced or fantastical your product is, if no one will buy it it doenst matter. Which of course you are correct. I dont think it is correct to assume "there currently is no market" means "there wont be by the time Starship becomes operational." I have a much more muted timeline for that of 4 to 5 years (at least) to iron out the all the technical issues they have not even discovered yet and that for me is just "working unmanned launches with payload." Not refueling and certainly not manned flight. But lets actually look at economics:

SpaceX cannot maintain Starship as simply a "billionaires toy." No matter how rick Elon is or manages to become, a business needs to be turning a profit and that means customers.

Proposed customers/revenue stream at various times:

P2P personnel: not happening. Certainly not happening to support Starship with the timeline i suspect will happen
P2P  cargo: Less insane that manned p2p, but sill enormous engineering challenge, regulatory challenge (sonic booms are no ones friend) Most importantly however, I dont see it as a multibillion market. Cargo ships are more efficient and in mass transport, efficiency is key. Worldwide air cargo per year is ~60 million tons while worldwide seaborne cargo is ~11 billion tons. What fraction of the 60 million on airfreight will be willing to pay at least 2 times the price for their cargo to be faster? Unknown, but I would hazard if you dropped a fully functioning starship with p2p capability into SpaceXs hands immediately they would struggle to do 1 million tons of cargo a year. Might supplement Starship operations, but I dont see it ever managing to become a main business model. The only reliable customer I see would be military.

Mars base:  To have an economic mars base in the near term, Mars would need to have something worth exporting. It simply doesn't. If someone *else* manages to set up a functioning colony, then there becomes a market for transferring supplies. But that is dependent on someone else floating the cost of actually building and supporting the colony.

Moon Base: Most of the same problems with Mars, except it becomes much more likely to find someone else to foot the bill. Especially when you broaden it out to beyond US government as the possible customer. Russia and China have both made talk of founding a lunar colony. If regulations change to allow SpaceX to support international efforts like that (and those countries also go thru with their plans) I could see cargo runs becoming a viable income stream for Starship. I dont see even China and Russia combined managing to fully support a sizable moon base with their existing launch vehicles and I could see them using starship as an interim solution while they develop domestic capacity. Likely? probably not due to politics, but its at least possible. Another possible country would be India who could see an operational starship as an opportunity.

While I understand the sentiment, you still need to pay for the ticket. Either you, or someone else. If you are going to mars and expect more than just to be dropped down with a finite life support and then die, the bill becomes even bigger. Again, as rich as some people are, in order to support a permanent human presence anywhere off world, there needs to be economics considered. Motivations do not make ability irrelevant.

So now lets go to ones that I think might actually work:

Starlink: this obviously is the fastest to become a reality .  Launch cadence does seem to have been a limiting factor for rollout and telecoms has the market to bring in the necessary billions. Will it be enough? Probably not long term, but will hopefully be enough to float the R&D costs for a few years. And maybe not just for Starship. As many of you have pointed out..

And on the list of possible market which i wish i could go into more detail on but this post is already far longer than I thought it was going to be :P

Space Mining: since transport is a big issue I dont see how a monumental revolution in transport capacity will be irrelavent. Will it be enough? Certainly not on its own, but it at least is a possibility.
Space Manufacture:
This is an even bigger what if than mining, because its something that we seriously have no idea what is possible. Lack of transport in this area has made R&D into zero g manufacturing nearly impossible. There have been no real advantages found, but to say we have enough data to eliminate the possibility that we will find some even in the next 5 years is just wrong. We just dont know.

I see the most likely customer for many starship launches within the next 10 to 20 years is a commercial research base either in low earth orbit or lunar orbit looking into manufacturing technologies. Probably funded by the semiconductor industry giants of NVidia/AMD/Intel or thier successors. They have the cash flow and existing techniques are rapidly hitting their limit for increasing circuit density.

Errr... I'm not sure where you heard that, no one in China nor Russia has considered a lunar colony. A crewed lunar base certainly, but even then there are no plans for permanent crewing (like the ISS) for that.

In China's case, they are working on a semi-reusable version of the Long March 9 super heavy lift launch vehicle. It isn't Starship, but it isn't the poor (for large base supply and the projects you mentioned) cadence of today's expendable vehicles either. Considering the payload, it could be decently economical.

And of course, such a rocket would be a decent alternative for the other missions you mentioned. It wouldn't be rapidly reusable Starship cheap, but it wouldn't be SLS or *insert expendable launch vehicle* expensive either. So I don't think China would have a reason to buy Starship launches even if they could.

I think the best and most realistic business opportunity (after Starlink) for Starship is construction of SPS satellites. Yes, SPS is not perfect, but with rapid-reuse, Starship sounds perfect for it.

Something like this- http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2016/12/energy-from-space-department-of.html

The proposed vehicles in this study are actually very Starship-like. Now obviously someone has to actually want to do this. Maybe Musk himself? Perhaps some former SpaceX employees could start such a business? But if a group of people wanted to utilize Starship to make money (which would result in Starship making money for SpaceX) SPS sounds like the best thing at this time.

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13 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I think the best and most realistic business opportunity (after Starlink) for Starship is construction of SPS satellites. Yes, SPS is not perfect, but with rapid-reuse, Starship sounds perfect for it.

SPS is a possibility, as its similar to Starlink. In general I think almost any space infrastructure project of almost any scale could be executed with Starship. We already pay for larger more expensive infrastructure projects than what a handful of Starship launches cost. 

 

I also realized, I was wrong about the capabilities of Starship affected the lives of everyday people. If Starship is so cheap, launch cadences so high, and payload capacity large enough, rideshare missions could get incredible cheap. To the point it it might become too cheap. If my cubesat launch costs a few million, except there are hundreds of cubesats with my mission all ridesharing together, your looking at costs that are completely sane for the average person.

Obviously you'd probably need some one to manage all those missions together (new business opportunity anyone?) or could create new enterprises to support those kinds of missions. 

This could mean your local school could send something into space (!!!) for the cost of a science fair. Hell why stop at LEO ride shares? Why not create deep space ride share missions using Starship to get to LEO that dispatches out multiple deep space rideshare missions using a separate isolated transfer stage?

 

I wonder how many humans you can stuff into 1 Starship launch with minimal payload (carry-ons only? ;D)

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3 hours ago, MKI said:

SPS is a possibility, as its similar to Starlink. In general I think almost any space infrastructure project of almost any scale could be executed with Starship. We already pay for larger more expensive infrastructure projects than what a handful of Starship launches cost. 

I also realized, I was wrong about the capabilities of Starship affected the lives of everyday people. If Starship is so cheap, launch cadences so high, and payload capacity large enough, rideshare missions could get incredible cheap. To the point it it might become too cheap. If my cubesat launch costs a few million, except there are hundreds of cubesats with my mission all ridesharing together, your looking at costs that are completely sane for the average person.

Obviously you'd probably need some one to manage all those missions together (new business opportunity anyone?) or could create new enterprises to support those kinds of missions. 

This could mean your local school could send something into space (!!!) for the cost of a science fair. Hell why stop at LEO ride shares? Why not create deep space ride share missions using Starship to get to LEO that dispatches out multiple deep space rideshare missions using a separate isolated transfer stage?

I wonder how many humans you can stuff into 1 Starship launch with minimal payload (carry-ons only? ;D)

SPS (solar power satellites) is interesting even if the power is diesel generator expensive if the receivers are cheap, yes it will require robotic manufacturing in space and other stuff to work. 
For spaceX an larger more capable starlink satellite had been interesting, How small could you make the receivers with the antenna was an 8 meter disc? Not good enough for an cell phone I assume but something who would be easy to build into cars and drones outside the smallest hobby ones. 

As I know the only product we know it would make sense to make in space today is long distance optical fibers, in micro gravity you get much higher quality. 
However we has not looked well enough and we only focused on some stuff who has very high return. With say $500 kg and weekly launches more doors opens. 
Some mentioned 3d printed or grown organs who would be relevant with this but is not today. 

The parallel to planes 100 years ago is pretty relevant, planes was used plenty during WW1 but the first commercial use was for transporting mail.  More so during WW1 first use was for recon later to direct long range artillery. (fighter was then developed to deny this from the enemy. )
Space today is mostly used for communication and recon. 

But no i don't believe in starship P2P as common transport, fuel use, transport to launch site, number of people needed to fill it rather than travel 8 hour later is getting small as in the Concord problem. 
And you have some range safety issues who is significant even for the cargo launch version because of the ground crew. 

As an fast response military or emergency use like getting equipment in after an invasion or earthquake yes, this will be semi disposable  
An bomber version is more likely, an 100 ton armor piercing  bomb at orbital velocity will hit hard. 

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19 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

I still want to see SpaceX make an Iron Man spacesuit. A flexible airtight undersuit next to the skin and a lightweight, open-gap titanium exoskeleton that provides MMOD protection and prevents the undersuit from ballooning.

A space suit doesn't actually have to be air-tight. The only part of a person that need to be in air is the head.

What's important is that the body needs some pressure. Thus the idea of "mechanical counter-pressure" suits.

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19 hours ago, sevenperforce said:
I still want to see SpaceX make an Iron Man spacesuit. A flexible airtight undersuit next to the skin and a lightweight, open-gap titanium exoskeleton that provides MMOD protection and prevents the undersuit from ballooning.

I have yet to see any reason why it wouldn’t work. 

The first objection I can think of is that of joints. How would you make these double-suit joints without the outer layer pinching the pressurized sublayer?

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5 hours ago, MKI said:

SPS is a possibility, as its similar to Starlink. In general I think almost any space infrastructure project of almost any scale could be executed with Starship. We already pay for larger more expensive infrastructure projects than what a handful of Starship launches cost. 

 

I also realized, I was wrong about the capabilities of Starship affected the lives of everyday people. If Starship is so cheap, launch cadences so high, and payload capacity large enough, rideshare missions could get incredible cheap. To the point it it might become too cheap. If my cubesat launch costs a few million, except there are hundreds of cubesats with my mission all ridesharing together, your looking at costs that are completely sane for the average person.

Obviously you'd probably need some one to manage all those missions together (new business opportunity anyone?) or could create new enterprises to support those kinds of missions. 

This could mean your local school could send something into space (!!!) for the cost of a science fair. Hell why stop at LEO ride shares? Why not create deep space ride share missions using Starship to get to LEO that dispatches out multiple deep space rideshare missions using a separate isolated transfer stage?

 

I wonder how many humans you can stuff into 1 Starship launch with minimal payload (carry-ons only? ;D)

My middle school did something akin to this but with weather balloons, and it was cooperative among all middle and high schools in the district. A bunch of cubes with sensors were tied to a series of balloons (like 10-12 cubes per balloon) and presumably the cost wasn't too bad. That said, I think there was some donations from Boeing and some other organizations too. I am not sure whether the "average" school in America could really afford this, even with help from another some sort of cubesat company and cheap Starship prices. I don't have knowledge of school budgets outside of decently wealthy urban areas so I'm not sure what the potential for this is.

The thing with launch cadence is interesting. How fast are satellites actually being built? How fast can you build a satellite? Are turn-around times counted in hours, not days, even necessary for standard commercial launches? Are space missions (whether they be Earth related like a communications satellite or "actual space" like a lunar probe) even actually held up by their launch vehicles, or are spacecraft and LVs equally "slow" right now?

Does cadence actually impact pricing? I can understand how expending an LV makes prices high but I don't see how speed impacts it- because it doesn't matter how fast you can launch your rocket again if you don't have something to launch in the first place. This is why I think rapid-reuse is more so suited for a big project like a constellation of SPS satellites, but not integral to other Starship ops, namely standard commercial launches.

I'm skeptical of the potential of a market for "just people" outside of professional scientists to launch cubesats on a rideshare mission. What would one even do with one? I think groups of enthusiasts banding together to operate/utilize a cubesat is more likely. Or perhaps you meant that "average" scientists could "have a sat"- not just organizations with lots of funding- instead of "normal" people- like the users of this forum- and I am misunderstanding.

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11 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Does cadence actually impact pricing? I can understand how expending an LV makes prices high but I don't see how speed impacts it- because it doesn't matter how fast you can launch your rocket again if you don't have something to launch in the first place. This is why I think rapid-reuse is more so suited for a big project like a constellation of SPS satellites, but not integral to other Starship ops, namely standard commercial launches.

Rapid reuse lowers cost because of the implied decrease in labor. Actual cost is what the provider charges.

If there is no price competition, any retail cost lowering would be a choice by SpaceX. They could just as well drop pricing just a little and they are still the cheapest around. Or drop a little, and launch literally immediately, or any day you like.

Their internal costs are another story. If they have fixed overhead, then cadence drives costs. The Starship ground crew required to support launches is XX people, and they get paid if today is a launch day or not. Minus "rapid turn around," it's that launch crew refurbing the vehicle for days, weeks, or months—all the while getting paid.

So I tend to think rapid reuse from a business perspective is mostly shorthand for controlling costs.

If you think you are sending 1000 Starships to Mars... then it starts to matter in a less abstract way ;)

 

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58 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I'm skeptical of the potential of a market for "just people" outside of professional scientists to launch cubesats on a rideshare mission. What would one even do with one? I think groups of enthusiasts banding together to operate/utilize a cubesat is more likely. Or perhaps you meant that "average" scientists could "have a sat"- not just organizations with lots of funding- instead of "normal" people- like the users of this forum- and I am misunderstanding.

Yes, when I said"everyday people" I more meant non-government/large organizations. Like most things, if you don't care you don't have to use it.

However, if you stuff a starship with as much stuff as you can, and the numbers work out exactly as planned, where its 2 million per launch. A cube sat could launch for under 100$. The numbers get worse if you can't "fill all the seats", or if the economics don't work out so well, but it is a price range that even if it gets worse, its within the realm of possibility for a good majority of people who have money to burn.

Hell at those prices your starting to get into first class international flights for a single person. Idk the feasibility of P2P economics but its already clear Starship should be more flexible than Concorde. This still is in the realm of richer folk, however.

 

58 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

The thing with launch cadence is interesting. How fast are satellites actually being built? How fast can you build a satellite? Are turn-around times counted in hours, not days, even necessary for standard commercial launches? Are space missions (whether they be Earth related like a communications satellite or "actual space" like a lunar probe) even actually held up by their launch vehicles, or are spacecraft and LVs equally "slow" right now?

Assuming something like a Lunar probe, you could launch multiple iterations with the main goal of building a lot cheaply. Starlink satellites already take this approach of a "quick and cheap built" approach to meeting requirements, expanding this to other use-cases and you can build your own market for whatever use-case you can imagine. 

Lots of people talk about "space mining", being expensive but potentially incredibly lucrative. It becomes much less expensive if you only need to pay a few million per launch to build out your own deep space network of probes and infrastructure. 

There has never been a reason to mass produce space infrastructure, because there was no way to get it into space that easily. If Starship offers that capabilities, I see no reason the probe/satellite market wont catch up as its just traditional mass production, and much easier than actually doing the "rocket" part haha.

 

 

If Starship actually works, I can see space infrastructure following a very similar path as something like the internet. Initially there isn't much reason for investment beyond a few niche reasons. (like academia) Due to increased prevalence, a few ideas will catch on, which might ignite a massive influx of investment which results in a bubble. After said bubble bursts, the end result will probably still be significant, as a few of the best ideas will stick around. There are just way to many possibilities out in space to say "naw, there is no market". If we could build cyber space out in 30+ years from scratch, and create some of the largest concentrations of wealth, imagine what actual space has to provide (!!!)

The crazy thing is, I think Elon already knows this, as the end result is ultimately humans do end up multiplanetary after all is said and done, and that's just insane. 

However, this again is only if Starship works as promised.

Edited by MKI
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53 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

 

Does cadence actually impact pricing? I can understand how expending an LV makes prices high but I don't see how speed impacts it- because it doesn't matter how fast you can launch your rocket again if you don't have something to launch in the first place. This is why I think rapid-reuse is more so suited for a big project like a constellation of SPS satellites, but not integral to other Starship ops, namely standard commercial launches.

 

Let's say you're renting a storefront, for a thousand dollars per month That means you have to make in profit a thousand dollars every month, just to avoid going into the red at the end of the month. If you sell 10 gizmos a month, each one has to be sold for a hundred dollars more than what you paid to make/get them. But if you sell a thousand gizmos, you only need them to be 1 dollar more than they cost you.

Same thing for launch pads, rocket factories, range crew, and general staffing. you're paying the same amount every month whether these people are working or standing around. The more missions you can do, the less each can cost while still covering the end of month expenses.

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Turn time ("rapid reuse") is extremely important in commercial airplanes because they cost money when sitting around, but they make money when flying. Except ... they only make money when flying if they have paying payloads.

So "rapid reuse" is only a big deal if they have the missions to make use of it. This could be for external customers, or it could be for internal needs like tanking fuels up to orbit.

3 hours ago, MKI said:

Idk the feasibility of P2P economics but its already clear Starship should be more flexible than Concorde.

Huh?

Concorde ran on jet fuel and could land and take off at existing airports all over the world, with no new infrastructure. This is certainly not true of Starship.

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7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

A space suit doesn't actually have to be air-tight. The only part of a person that need to be in air is the head.

What's important is that the body needs some pressure. Thus the idea of "mechanical counter-pressure" suits.

Mechanical counter-pressure suits are nice and all, but the required pressure is quite high, meaning that they are extremely difficult to put on and take off and have to be precisely form-fitting. They also tend to impede certain bodily functions and can cause soft tissue injury (for example, regions like the armpits tend to become distended).

6 hours ago, Silavite said:

The first objection I can think of is that of joints. How would you make these double-suit joints without the outer layer pinching the pressurized sublayer?

That's a feature, not a bug.

The sublayer would have no joints at all; it would be flexible . The outer layer, however, would have joints which maintain constant volume.

The thing that makes it difficult to bend your arm in a conventional spacesuit is that bending your arm reduces the total internal volume of the suit, which means you are mechanically compressing air. The NASA EVA suits get around this by using pure oxygen at low pressure so that there is less exertion required to mechanically compress the air, but it's still a significant amount. To avoid this, you try to design joints which can be opened or closed without changing their internal volume. Constant-volume joints in a flexible suit are possible, but they are bulky and extremely ungainly:

Spoiler

constant_volume_joint_first_step.jpg

And since a hard suit must have seals between each of its joints, the only constant-volume joints possible for a hard suit are rotating ones, which leads to this horrific nonsense:

Spoiler

220px-AX-5-spacesuit.jpg

However, if you DON'T have to have an airtight seal on the hard portion of the suit, designing a constant-volume joint is trivial. Consider the shoulder pauldron on a traditional medieval suit of armor, where the overlapping plates can slide over each other to move the joint easily:

Spoiler

52ffd103acbdd9d64a74ba87b6f19727.jpg

For a more modern aesthetic, consider this guy, who built a fully flexible metal Mark V Iron Man suit that actually folds up like a briefcase:

ironman.png

Full video here:

Spoiler

 

You can have a completely flexible outer hard suit because all the surfaces can slide over each other. Of course, it is impossible for those surfaces to seal, but the point is they don't have to -- gaps are fine because the outer suit's only job is to keep the flexible undersuit from ballooning and ensure it maintains constant volume so that there's no extra exertion required to move the joints.

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6 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Mechanical counter-pressure suits are nice and all, but the required pressure is quite high, meaning that they are extremely difficult to put on and take off and have to be precisely form-fitting. They also tend to impede certain bodily functions and can cause soft tissue injury (for example, regions like the armpits tend to become distended).

Well yeah, they have to be designed correctly. Like any space suit.

Also, any space suit tends to "impede certain bodily functions".

Obviously in-cabin pressure suits have less-demanding requirements, but we are talking about EVA suits here, right?

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1 minute ago, mikegarrison said:

Well yeah, they have to be designed correctly. Like any space suit.

Also, any space suit tends to "impede certain bodily functions".

Obviously in-cabin pressure suits have less-demanding requirements, but we are talking about EVA suits here, right?

Yes, we're talking about EVA suits here, but it's not just a design issue; there's a fundamental challenge because in order for the suit to work, it has to exert quite a bit of counterpressure. And that means it must be literally too small to put on, which means putting it on is always fundamentally challenging...like a grown adult trying to put on a child-sized wetsuit. Add microgravity and it gets even more challenging.

It also has to be much, much more exactingly tailored to each person's body and cannot accommodate any changes in body shape.

Hybrid suits, in comparison, are not new; there are plenty of them in production. Probably one of the best is the MK-III:

230px-Mark-III_D-RATS_2004.jpg

This suit can support a full atmosphere of internal pressure, meaning you don't need to prebreathe to transition. The core of the suit is a completely solid torso with sealed rotating-bearing joints at the shoulders, upper chest, navel, hips, thighs, and ankles. It avoids ballooning at the upper arms, elbows, wrists, and knees by using multiple layers of extremely thick fabric, which makes these joints stiff enough to stay at nearly constant-volume, but of course also makes those same joints puffy and difficult for the wearer to articulate.

However, if the solid portions didn't have to be airtight -- if they were basically just a suit of armor overlaid on an internal pressure suit -- then the whole thing would become much smaller, lighter, and easier to doff and don.

It would be almost like the Master Chief armor:

Spoiler

3855166-9557183954-cf_ch.png

The outer armor has tons of gaps but provides mobility at all the joints; the inner suit liner is the airtight part.

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1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

Yes, we're talking about EVA suits here, but it's not just a design issue; there's a fundamental challenge because in order for the suit to work, it has to exert quite a bit of counterpressure. And that means it must be literally too small to put on, which means putting it on is always fundamentally challenging...like a grown adult trying to put on a child-sized wetsuit. Add microgravity and it gets even more challenging.

Yes, I'm aware of these issues. There have been various proposals like electro-active polymers and thermal memory polymers which might allow the suit fit to be relaxed so it could be donned or exited. I'm not saying any of these are going to be successful, but it's an option people have have been studying.

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Latex envelope and leather bands in the most loaded places.

Belts, of course. To attach equipment.

And rings for EVA tethers.

A tight collar with life activity sensors.

The boots may stay same, they're enough stylish.

Hooks (like in Resident Evil, on the butcher with bag on head), to grab the railings and lunar rocks.

Also a custom helmet attached to the collar.

Edited by kerbiloid
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