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 basic: they’re color coded, have a life support system and a couple of tubes that look as though they’ll get caught on things, but they look fairly rugged and easy to use for their wearers. Those interior lights would probably get annoying though: I can imagine that they’d reflect off the helmet’s inner surface and be really distracting.

outland

Outland

The suits depicted in Outland become a hybrid of the miner’s coverall and the conventional spacesuit, particularly the space helmet.

Space suits from science fiction

Martian spacesuit

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 ...