How to Dress for Space | Hacker News Reader

How to Dress for Space

washingtonpost.com

32 points_114 comments

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...

> 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.

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.

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

The beauty of three.js

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.

> All your work on a fascinating topic wasted.

That's unfairly harsh. If I enjoyed it, I'm sure others did too, so it could not have been, by definition, "wasted".

I use Firefox's Reader mode, and it fixes most of these "scroll all the time" sites.

The scrollytelling is the point.

Usually WaPo articles can be read in browser without enabling javascript, but not this one. This sort of presentation is really obnoxious and not at all accessible (which frankly shouldn't even be legal in a world where every business is required to have ramps or elevators.)

Thankfully I did get it to work in emacs, which is less than ideal for most.

You need Javascript to make these innovative presentations. If you have such a problem with enabling Javascript, please explain how you would do this strictly in HTML and CSS that is better than the current production. I'll wait.

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.

> 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.

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.

It says right in the article this is a dialogue between the papers space industry reporter, and their fashion critic...

How would you have done it better? The piece was visually appealing and interesting. I do understand the gripe of the back-and-forth be tween the science writer and fashion critic.

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