
How to Dress for Space - _1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/immersive-space-suits-history-fashion-and-function/
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sambroner
Well, that was incredibly cool. I didn't realize until I looked through the
suits, but they're each iconic. Except maybe the Boeing suit, I'd seen them
all before.

SpaceX really does understand marketing about (semi-sarcasm) as well as they
understand rockets. Their suits look like they're from Ender's Game.

I hadn't seen this kind of visual post from the Washington Post and they did a
great job. It feels like a "clapback" on the NYT, but WaPo still misses with
the cheesy "you finished" visual and the shockingly intrusive advertising...

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catacombs
> I hadn't seen this kind of visual post from the Washington Post

The Post has been doing these kinds of visual stories for years. Consider
doing a web search of the paper's Graphics team portfolio.

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Canada
That was a really CPU intensive read, consuming 14% of my battery, but very
nicely presented. I like these kind of well produced presentations. The Notre-
Dame post put out by the NYT the other day is another good example.

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catacombs
> That was a really CPU intensive read, consuming 14% of my battery, but very
> nicely presented.

The beauty of three.js

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gumby
I'm sorry, WaPo, but this presentation is just so annoying (tiny little
snippets of text the fly in and obscure the pictures) that I had to give up.
All your work on a fascinating topic wasted.

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overlordalex
As part of this it appears that they were written by multiple people and it
really kept jarring me out of the flow of the article. One writer was talking
about the technical specifications of the suits while the other was giving
weird personal observations.

Contrast:

> If you pay a bazillion dollars to go into space and you get this — I’m
> assuming you get to keep it — you will wear those boots again! It seems you
> can pull it apart and continue to wear it and keep the bragging rights
> going.

with

> The suit’s outer layer is made with fire-retardant materials. The gray parts
> are Nomex, a flame-resistant material. The whites are a Teflon-like
> material.

EDIT: Found a more direct comparison:

> The suit was silver for a number of reasons, according to Cathleen Lewis, a
> curator in the Space History Department of the National Air and Space
> Museum. First, it would make the astronauts stand out in case they needed to
> be rescued. It helped reflect sunlight and keep them from heating up,
> especially in the outer edges of the atmosphere, where the sunlight is
> unfiltered. Finally, NASA really wanted to set these guys apart from the
> other pilots with a very space-agey silvery suit.

vs

> This silver sets the ground rules for how we imagine spacesuits to be —
> everything that we think is futuristic is always silver and reflective.
> Whenever there would be anything related to the future in fashion shows and
> people imagining what the next century would look like, they always started
> with metallic fabrics.

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darkpuma
Some of the common-person comments were fine, not insightful but not that bad
either.

But some of them were really inane, like saying a fluorescent orange high-viz
jumpsuit looks like a Navy SEAL uniform (how could you confuse a high-viz
outfit and camouflage?? At best it might resemble an orange life vest that
Navy SEALs might use during training. Why not compare it to something more
reasonable like a firefighter's outfit, or even to high vis clothing worn by
coast guard rescue teams? If the medium were TV or radio I could write that
off as a momentary slip of the tongue, but in text? It really makes me wonder
how a statement that ridiculous gets published. It makes me thing the
perspective of 'Robin' was being deliberately distorted to _play up_ the
"uninformed common person point of view" angle.

