Comments on: The Latest In Space Fashion.

By: Ross

Ross — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 14:18:47 +0000

There is a shot of a room with 2 big red ‘old school’ eva suits.

In any case, loved the post, wasn’t aware that freezing wasn’t an issue in space but it makes sense now.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 18:11:29 +0000

Must have missed that, and I’m certainly not going to watch it again to look for it ¬_¬

By: Smurf

Smurf — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 08:47:35 +0000

“although this does beg the question of how they knew they wouldn’t need vacuum suits in the first place”

Is there not a shot of the spacesuit room thing that shows a whole collection of types? I’m sure I remember seeing a big red one. I’d imagine they brought different types of suits for different planets but didn’t think they needed a line in the film to say that because it’s not very interesting to the average viewer.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 20:25:56 +0000

I wasn’t aware they were continuing to do research into compression suits, actually. Also I don’t particularly have a real problem with Prometheus’s use of space suits (if I did, I would have mentioned it in my first post). It’s one of those things you just accept in order to facilitate the story, like artificial gravity or ftl travel. I just thought it would be an interesting thing to talk about in the context of the film.

I totally agree with you on the shuttle thing, though. At the very least they’d need both in order to do any serious exploration.

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 19:46:56 +0000

I haven’t seen this movie yet so there may be critical information I’m missing while writing this reply.

I think you are making an assumption (perhaps not unfair) that they know nothing about the planet before the start of the mission. Lets give you the benefit of the doubt here and say they know absolutely nothing about this planet. If this is the case then they really shouldn’t be bringing suits at all. Space vacuum is a harsh environment but if you were to rank all planetary environments by how well they could accommodate humans, space vacuum would probably be somewhere in the middle (earth-temperate on the “best” end, high pressure/high temperature/highly corrosive/high gravity on the “crap” end.) Point being; you shouldn’t assume that even an EVA suit is going to help you when you are trying to land on a planet like Venus. What they should have brought was a smaller shuttle aerospace vehicle they could have all gotten into to do the nitty-gritty exploration.

With that said, I don’t think it is unreasonable for a future human agency to have technology which allows it to detect/reasonably predict certain aspects of a far away planet from a huge distance. We have been reasonably successful to doing this today with exo-planet discovery and things we know about star mass and radiation. So, before the mission was even launched, they could have brought the right suit (or several suits and selected this once once they got there.)

Now all of the above aside. Lets compare this suit to the good old EVAs. You briefly mentioned the compression suit R&D that has been going on. There are problems with this suit like what you mentioned. The last I read about it though, they were able to create some what of a “one size fits most” suit that could potentially get the job done. The problem was that they need to get compression equal to 1/3 atm and they can only get to around 1/8 atm or so. If they could achieve this however, the compression suit would be as effective in a vacuum as the current EVA but offer far better articulation and fidelity of movement. In a SciFi movie about the future, this is something I wouldn’t have a hard time giving a pass to.

Anyways, that’s my 2-cents without having seen the movie (which I have you to thank for given your first review.)