Prada To Design NASA's New Moon Suit - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

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  • What does that make astronauts then?

    Frilly red shirts in high heels?

    • Frilly red shirts in high heels?

      That sounds like Him [pinimg.com] from the Powerpuff Girls.

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    The way things are going I'm truly surprised it's not Hugo Boss.

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      Only if the Reps win the next election.

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      Don't give the folks you're talking about the pleasure of defining how "things are going". That's not in their purview unless you give it to them.
      
      Entropy and evil are always there, but so is light, and a single spark defeats otherwise infinite darkness.
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      • • Re:

          Every information medium goes through this. Printing presses did it; radio did it; TV did it, text internet, videos...etc.
          
          First it's liberating, bringing new associations and commentaries; then anarchic, when every petty opinion decides its agenda is entitled to attention; then tyrannical, when oligarchs and governments consolidate power and coordinate propaganda; but finally it's just another part of society, and most people roll their eyes at its excesses while finding the nourishing bits wherever the

          • Re:

            Yea thx but no thx. I'm not in the habit of ignoring danger, especially when it has to potential to be the world ending variety.

            Besides, I've pretty much been to hell already, this is nothing. I do see someone took the time to downvote me though, gee I wonder why they would do that?

            I just want to annihilate the whole planet sometimes... lol. Then again, I have no idea how we are even here still. Blind luck? Definitely not on purpose.

            So many "I hope this doesn't kill us all" moments already taken without my

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            Yea, that downvote. That's either MAGATS, russia or china. All three are butthurt so bad because I have the nerve to resist their bullshits. That's also an abuse of this "karma" system, which is what these fucking repressed faggots continually do everywhere they go. They abuse the fucking rules and NO ONE does shit about it because you're all fucking useless. Give me the reins and I will fix this whole fucking thing.

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      Supposedly Hugo Boss designed uniforms for the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany.

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        Nice sig.

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    Well, FABULOUS, of course!

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      I shoulda read more before posting - I posted the same thing!

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        Great minds think alike.;)

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    Demonically fashionable... ?

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    it makes them FABULOUS!

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    Space devils! Very fabulous space devils!

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    Not one has ever died because of a spacesuit, and in fact three died because they weren't wearing any (Soyuz 11).

    • Re: Astronauts will die in style.

      Though (at least) one has come very close. The first EVA went pretty badly wrong because the Russians didnâ(TM)t anticipate the problem of the suit becoming rigid when it ballooned out. The cosmonaut very nearly couldnâ(TM)t get back into his spacecraft as a result.

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        True. Although that definitely wasn't a result of aesthetics in the suit design. I would admit there's even another example, when an ISS astronaut's helmet started filling up with water during an EVA. That too wasn't about aesthetics, but about relying on thirty-year-old suits that had otherwise served honorably.

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        The Russian designers should have paid more attention to Capitalist Science Fiction. Back in the '40s and '50s, illustrators were drawing space suits that had a constant volume as the wearer moved to avoid exactly that. That's why the arms and legs looked like a string of spheres. If you take off today's suit's oversuit, you'll see that underneath they look roughly the same.

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      And now this may change

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        The better and more useful the suits, rockets, and spacecraft, the more people will be in space, and the more likely that any given accident will befall someone. But that's a good problem to have.
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    Prada is Italian, based in Milan.

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      It can still be made in the USA and at least the NASA guys ar going to look GOOOOOOOD. Pity Elon Musk's the Marsonauts, if his Teslas are being assembled in parking lots the Mars colonist's space suits will probably be assembled in bathrooms and broom closets at the SpaceX facility.

• "The CocaCola Lander is now on Mars, the first man to set foot on another planet is stepping down in his Gucci spacesuit. His first words are 'This is almost as refreshing as a Pepsi' OMG WHAT A SCOOP!!!"

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    HIs second words are "Arrrghhh! Air leaking out... can't breath, who TF designed this suuiiiittt....."

  • This isnâ(TM)t really any different to Apollo - the suits then were in large part made by Playtex. Turns out that if you want really well made bespoke garments, you canâ(TM)t do much better than hiring companies whose entire business is making bespoke garments for the rich and famous.

    • This made more sense when highly skilled company employees did the manufacturing in-house. Playtex had extensive experience with manufacturing latex garments at the time. Prada is known for their leatherwork. I hope we aren't sending up the astronauts in steampunk spacesuits.

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        Actually, I hope we are sending them up in steampunk suits. That would be cool af.

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          Oh hell yes!

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        This isn't about manufacturing skills, it's about design skills.

        • The Devil's in the details

          it's about design skills

          That was my first thought as well, and whether they picked a firm known more for form than functionality.

      • Re: By the year 2040

        I suspect the skill of accurately stitching through multiple layers of very tough material is likely to come in very handy too. While yeh, latex was used in the 60s, materials have moved a long way, and thereâ(TM)s both synthetic materials, and composite materials that can improve on simple latex. There were also significant problems with the original moon suit material. For example, we discovered that lunar regolith really likes to cling to everything. The new suit outer layer needs to integrate c

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          If precision sewing of leatherwork is what you need, you really want to hire Buffalo Bill [wikipedia.org] Shame, isn't it, that he died about 24 years ago.

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      Lifting and separating are also important for rockets and their stages
• Instead of spending Money on repetitive cat-walk fashion shows, it is good to see that kind of money as sponsorship to scientific missions.

• I couldn't find out if Prada really has a division making advanced engineered fabrics or not, but if they do I'd like to see them create something we can use on Earth. For example I lately see quite a number of everyday construction workers this summer wearing those puffy cooled jackets, which look ugly and nerdy but I expect are critical with the heat waves we are getting. And skiing always has used advanced materials. It would be neat if they could create items for protection from abrasion, temperature an

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    If you want durable cloths that look good and are designed for hot humid summers, you could do far worse than going back to seersucker [wikipedia.org]. Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was used by soldiers for summer uniforms in places like India and the Philippines, and railroad engineers even wore it in hot, humid parts of the US like the old south.

• What next, Mattel design the lander?

  I'm sure Prada do fine clothes, but what the hell do they know about designing a life support system that doubles as a type of clothing to keep astronauts alive in the most inhospitable enviroment man can currently reach?

  The glory years of Nasa really are well behind them, how sad.

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    but what the hell do they know about designing a life support system that doubles as a type of clothing to keep astronauts alive in the most inhospitable enviroment man can currently reach?

    Yes indeed. What could a company whose main purpose is to deal in a multitude of materials to make clothing know about designing a type of clothing to be worn in a challenging environment. It's not as if expertise in one area could be used in another similar area.

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      And people at Prada definitely won't be able to talk to anyone at NASA or any other scientists or engineers if they have any scientific or engineering questions.

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        LOL!:)

        Yeah, questions like "how do we do this?". Because obviously the mincers at prada have a ton of experience with making materials that can survive an enviroment like the moon.

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        Yeah, I'm not sure why several posts are screeching, says helping right there in the first sentence. Prada won't be the final sign off on a damn thing, and for all I know the collaboration ends at color choice.

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      "deal in a multitude of materials to make clothing know about designing a type of clothing to be worn in a challenging environment"

      Right, because the catwalk and St Tropez have so much in common with the surface of the moon.

      Fucking idiot.

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        They are both harsh environments, lacking in atmosphere.

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    well, you could read 2 paragraphs of abstract and find out.

    or you could also just join the trolling choir. i know, fat chance, the headline is anything but innocent.

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    Yeah, why would one ever contract with a company that makes bras and girdles to make a space suit? what do they know about aerospace?

    Oh... Wait...

    I guess ILC Dover doesn't exist.

    I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt; knowing how to integrate multiple different fabrics and textures is a very valuable skill.

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      I was thinking more along the lines of Frederick's of Hollywood [wikipedia.org]. It's nice to see that there are still posters here with this kind of dirty mind.

• "Axiom said Prada would bring expertise with materials and manufacturing to the project. "

  Yes, Prada has decades of experience dealing with vacuum, in the heads of their clientele.

  • Re: Indeed! Brace for it

    They're actually Prada fit.

• ... an effing break, will ya?!?

  WTF is effing Prada (??!?) going to add of value to an effing Space Suit??!?

  NASA gear is so iconic it's a absolute, total and compete fashion statement all of it's own.

  As somebody who is into fashion (nearly went into fashion design as a profession) and into all things NASA and Space this has to be the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time. A very very dumb idea and the exact opposite of anything Avantgarde or interesting fashion statement.

  • The traditional NASA process for development is broken. They tried it, and the costs ballooned out of control because the legacy contractors spent all their time looking for ways to squeeze the taxpayer instead of working on the goddamn suit. NASA ended up looking at a quote for billions of dollars and a timeline of practically never just to make an up-to-date replacement for what they already had. So they picked a better way, affording a commercial contract to a company (Axiom) that already hosts private spaceflights via SpaceX and will be supporting suit development internally as an investment in their business plans. Like SpaceX, they want their suits to look great; and like SpaceX, they have every conceivable incentive to make them work 100% of the time.

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    During the Apollo program, they wound up awarding the space suit program to a company that primarily made Bras and Girdles. ILC, aka the company that makes "Playtex" won the contract, and produced very high quality suits. Why would a bra maker ever be the right company? Well, as it turns out, building form fitting clothes that are equivolume, close fitting, out of many different materials, is a skill, whether it's to keep a woman's bust under control or keep a pressurized atmosphere in against the harsh vac

• by a5y ( 938871 ) on Friday October 06, 2023 @05:30AM (#63905161)

  What matters is whoever sews the thing has a veto on the design so any idiots with "designer" in the job description will get vanity elements shitcanned before they kill anyone. Akin's Laws of Space Craft Design are never obsolete. A bunch apply, but always the last:

  "Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit because most of the analysis was right)"

  IIRC early space suits demanded such precise stitching they went with seamstresses for women's underwear. The decades of offshoring and outsourcing ended that as a solution, Nothing like an economics theorist to destroy a time tested process relied on in matters of life and death.

• "types of composite fabrics and may actually be able to make some real technical contributions"

  • Re: People running this NASA effort are a joke!

    It's been a joke for a while.

    About 10 years ago they were seriously pushing this "asteroid capture" thing to the point of cading up a spacecraft with a big deployable butterfly net to catch a 10m-class asteroid.

    Apparently no one on the program study ever passed high school physics. Because then they would have learned about this thing called "angular momentum" and would have realized that that butterfly net would have snapped into a million little pieces if it grabbed on to a spinning asteroid at least 100

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    oh its been a joke for quite a while now, at this point in time its mostly an over glorified makerspace

• How about sponsorship patches on the spacesuits? The fees NASA could charge or get for sponsorship would help fund the space missions.
  The astronauts spacesuits could full of patches like NASCAR drivers.
  A spacesuit designed by prada and full of patches like NASCAR. That would be funny!
• "Congratulations, Neil! How does it feel to be the first man on Mars?" "Fabulous, darling."
• Let's not forget that Playtex - yes, the bra manufacturer - was largely responsible for making the Apollo lunar EVA suits. [ref 1 [smithsonianmag.com]] [ref 2 [cbsnews.com]]

• Well a bra company, playtex, won the right to make the apollo spacesuits. They had lots of experience working with rubberized materials.

• ... Hugo Boss. I like some of their earlier designs.

• When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

• We in 1999 on the runaway moon protest. We were there first, and you couldn't really see the strings much.

• Prada's expertise is not in materials or fashion. They're materials suck and their products are ugly as fuck. Prada has never pushed fashion, or materials in fashion, forward. They can contribute absolutely nothing.