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The Daily Toad: Proudly disseminating sensationalised rubbish since 1645. 1st June 2020

SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and its long awaited deployment to the International Space Station was hailed as a milestone in space history yesterday, but privately, insiders had become concerned that the high-tech vehicle would ever see manned flight.

'It was those practical yet slightly lame-looking spacesuits,' an insider was reported to have said yesterday, 'those were the real stumbling blocks. Simply put, the executives at SpaceX thought they just didn't look futuristic enough.' While the astronauts themselves said they were entirely happy with the spacesuits, confident the design team had done their job and as regards the aesthetics, freely admit they would: 'wear a dustbin so long as it was safe', Internal SpaceX memos reveal that even up until the last minute, senior management were still wanting 'something like Matt Damon's suit in 'The Martian'.

Matt Damon looking a lot cooler in his 'high utility' Martian surface suit.

It was reported by the same source that the spacesuit designers at SpaceX spent many months explaining to senior management that Matt Dillon's spacesuit had only one design parameter: to look good on film. And while, yes, they could see that the spacesuits in 'Interstellar' were also quite cool, dealing with the practicalities of withstanding a potential pressure leak in a high risk environment required a more prosaic design process, which was clearly incompatible with having the suits look anything like the one John Hurt wore in 'Alien'.

Although the suits passed all the tests required of them and were deemed 'Quite the most comfortable and well-designed suits so far', memos from the PR department of SpaceX were concerned right up until a month before launch, suggesting a rethink on the boots and 'bringing them in at the waist', while at the same time suggesting it would be 'totally awesome' if the astronauts looked quite similar to Frank Poole and Dave Bowman from '2001: A Space Odyssey', and maybe calling the onboard computer HAL or something.

An image alleged to have been sent from the PR arm of SpaceX as a suggestion on how the docking tunnel should look between the Crew Dragon spacecraft and the ISS.

Luckily for the project the suit design office enjoy broad autonomy when it came to design safety, so they remained unswayed by the argument, although design team insiders said they were tinkering with a 'Armageddon' style spacesuit, but only as an outer layer that could be worn past the world's photographers on the way to the Spacecraft hatch, but jettisoned by the astronauts before ingress.

Josh Hatchett, Ace Toad Reporter,
Exclusively for Jasperland, June 9th 2020.