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 suit that’s more than just a fancy costume, there’s one that’s impractical and nonsensical even in a fictional world.

There’s no such thing as an “ideal” space suit, because you need specific features for different environments. But we can answer a few basic questions. Is a fictional space suit safe and wearable for its characters? Does it perform its task well? And does it realistically look like it could perform that task? With that in mind, here are some of the greatest and most cringeworthy depictions, arranged from worst to best.

Source: The Verge

The EVA suit used in The Martian is designed with an eye towards of realism for what a Martian mission might require.

They’re sparkly! They have weird, seemingly useless colored attachments, the wearer can really only see right in front of them, and the visor extends to the back of their head for some reason.

That huge bubble helmet would provide amazing visibility, but it also looks like it could be easily broken.

A beautiful, iconic design that did draw on some real concepts.

They even color-coded each astronaut so that the audience could tell each character apart. NASA only figured that out after Apollo 11, when people couldn’t tell the astronauts apart on the television broadcasts, and slapped some stripes onto the mission commander’s suit.

The suits look extremely cumbersome, with a lot of armor that will restrict one’s movement, not to mention corners and edges that could snag on their surrounding

I just can’t quite buy that a suit made up of random parts is going to be safe or effective at any of them in the long run.

These suits can keep someone alive on a planet’s surface, as we saw early in the show when Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace is shot down on an uninhabitable moon

These suits are used interchangeably between surface and space expeditions, and the helmets look as though they limit one’s vision quite a bit.

These suits just look ... kind of boring, which is a shame, given that most of the film’s design is really distinctive.

The film actually does use some realistic suits. The characters train in a dive tank at NASA, and they’re later seen in the Advanced Crew Escape Suit that real shuttle crews wore during launches. But the suits they wear on the asteroid are fictional “next-generation” designs. They look a bit complicated, and are designed specifically for ground missions, carrying thrusters to keep someone on the ground in a low gravity environment. Props for specific purposes there.

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

Bell’s suit draws some inspiration from NASA’s astronauts, as well as some classic science fiction films, like Alien.

These suits are designed with a good dose of cool 1960s futurism, but they also get a lot of details right, thanks to designers who worked in the space and tech industry

The Prometheus suits are beautiful: skintight, lightly armored, with a fantastic bubble helmet. But as cool as they look, they don’t seem very functional for serious or unexpected work — and they’re not good at all at keeping alien acid vomit at bay.

Like Firefly’s suits, they appear to be well-worn and patched, but these look like they’re quite a bit more durable than those ones.

Stone gets in and out of these suits really easily, and doesn’t wear a cooling garment, whereas in real life, these are suits that are quite complicated to put on. But their appearance is as close as we can realistically expect in a big-budget Hollywood film.

What really makes this suit really stand apart is its golden exterior, and the fact that it isn’t designed for any sort of multi-purpose use. It’s intended only for the Icarus and its mission to go close to the sun, and allow the astronauts onboard to go outside if needed in an environment of intense light.

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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 ...