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.
That's unfairly harsh. If I enjoyed it, I'm sure others did too, so it could not have been, by definition, "wasted".
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.
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.
Thankfully I did get it to work in emacs, which is less than ideal for most.