All Features articles – Page 6
-
FeaturesWA100: The big list
WA100 is BD’s annual survey of the world’s largest practices ranked by the number of fee-earning architects they employ. View a table of this year’s top 100 architects
-
FeaturesThe Martian
The Martian (both the book and the movie) is a story that’s a realistic and plausible take on a future mission to Mars, and Mark Watney’s space suit is probably one of the most important environments in the story. After being stranded on Mars, he spends a considerable amount of ...
-
-
FeaturesSunshine
In most cases, a film space suit is a film space suit. Sometimes, however, film designers recognize that they need something really specific. Case in point is the EVA suit used in Danny Boyle’s movie Sunshine. What really makes this suit really stand apart is its golden exterior, and the ...
-
FeaturesThe Expanse
The Expanse is set in a plausibly-realistic future in which much of humanity lives and works around the solar system, and a result, the show’s characters use a variety space suits. In most cases, what we see are really utilitarian garments, used by blue collar workers on space ships or ...
-
FeaturesAlien Franchise
The Alien franchise is loaded with cool space suits, some better than others. Alien leads the way with the suits the crew of the Nostromo’s uses for surface EVAs. These look appropriately designed for use in a harsh environment, while the space ship comes equipped with another space EVA suit ...
-
Features2001: A Space Odyssey
It’s hard to find a space suit design that’s more iconic than the one from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. These suits appear a couple of times in the film in a couple of different environments: first when the characters go into Tycho Crater to explore an anomaly, and ...
-
FeaturesMoon
Sam Bell, the sole occupant of a mining facility in Duncan Jones’ debut film Moon, uses a really fantastic-looking space suit. Bell’s suit draws some inspiration from NASA’s astronauts, as well as some classic science fiction films, like Alien. This space suit is designed for excursions out onto the lunar ...
-
FeaturesOutland
An underrated sci-fi classic is the 1981 film Outland, which featured Sean Connery as a Federal Marshal working on a mining colony on Jupiter’s moon Io. The film features a fairly iconic suit, with a massive helmet with lights designed to show off the actor’s face. The suits look pretty ...
-
FeaturesArmageddon
Weeks before Michael Bay started filming his 1998 blockbuster Armageddon, he apparently went to the props department and was dismayed at the space suits that he saw. “It looked like an Adidas jogging suit on a rack,” he complained. And “if you don’t have cool space suits, your entire movie ...
-
FeaturesInterstellar
Interstellar calls back to past cinematic space suits, which certainly look plausible and realistic, with details like color-coding for different characters. These appear mainly to be used for ground excursions, or for when they’re performing maneuvers in the Endurance. They do have some neat features, like thrusters mounted on the ...
-
FeaturesBattlestar Galactica
For a space show, we don’t actually see many space suits in the SCIFI channel’s revival of Battlestar Galactica. On the rare occasions people head into space, it’s usually pilots flying combat or patrol missions, where they wear suits designed to keep a pilot alive after being ejected, which look ...
-
FeaturesMission to Mars
The 2000 film Mission to Mars is an exercise in exasperation, and the space suits that its characters use are no exception. These suits are used interchangeably between surface and space expeditions, and the helmets look as though they limit one’s vision quite a bit. But there are some good ...
-
FeaturesFirefly
When I first watched Firefly, I was struck by an early scene where protagonist Captain Mal Reynolds is floating through space in a distinctly patched-together suit from repurposed parts, like his old combat helmet. Like lots of things in the series, these suits look like they could be used for ...
-
FeaturesStargate Universe
The Stargate franchise has used its share of space suits, ranging from plausibly realistic to downright strange. The last series, Stargate Universe, is definitely the latter. When an expedition is stranded on a distant starship, they discover several of these outfits and use them to explore a couple of hostile ...
-
FeaturesDestination Moon
The 1950 film Destination Moon is another classic that predates the space age, like Explorers on the Moon. But it’s one of the first to deal with space travel in a somewhat realistic way, almost two decades before astronauts landed on the Moon, and even before the first rockets brought ...
-
FeaturesExplorers on the Moon
A favorite space suit appeared long before real humans went into space: it’s in the 1950s Tintin comics (and later cartoons) Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. They’re hard armor with a bubble helmet rather than lighter cloth, and seem cumbersome to wear and walk around in, not to ...
-
FeaturesStar Trek
Where to start with Star Trek? The upcoming show Star Trek Discovery features a badass suit that looks like an entire miniature spaceship. But there are also some bizarre, cringeworthy depictions, like these from The Original Series. They’re sparkly! They have weird, seemingly useless colored attachments, the wearer can really ...
-
FeaturesTitan I.E.
Years after the destruction of Earth, Cale ends up working salvage on a space station, which seems like a risky job — we even see him get smacked with a huge section of a ship that’s being dismantled. But although the armored suit superficially looks designed for this work, this ...
-
FeaturesSpace suits from science fiction
Space suits are cool — and complicated. Unsurprisingly, science fiction writers, movie directors, and prop-makers also love space suits — you’ll find them everywhere from Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Have Space Suit — Will Travel, to the latest Alien movie. But not everybody does their homework: for every fictional space ...
