Early Wednesday morning, SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted a photo of the spacesuit that will be used by astronauts flying aboard the company's Dragon spacecraft, perhaps as early as next year. It is white and looks futuristic.

In his Instagram post, Musk added that this suit was not a mock-up but rather a fully functional unit. "Already tested to double vacuum pressure," he wrote. "Was incredibly hard to balance aesthetics and function. Easy to do either separately." (Double vacuum pressure simply means the suit was probably inflated to twice the pressure of sea level and then put into a vacuum chamber.)

Musk gave no other technical information about the suit. Most strikingly, it is white, in contrast to the very blue spacesuits unveiled by Boeing in January.

These are not, strictly speaking, "space suits." Rather, they are more properly flight suits designed to be worn during the ride to space and again on the ride back down to Earth. They have a limited time in which they can operate in a full vacuum and are not intended for spacewalks.

Boeing and SpaceX remain in a competition to design, develop, and fly spacecraft capable of transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. Both companies have expressed confidence about completing crew test flights in 2018, but their timelines have slipped in the past and may do so again. It seems unlikely that Boeing's earlier reveal of its spacesuit indicates that it is ahead of SpaceX. Parties close to the competition have told Ars that it remains unclear which company will get to the launch pad first.