Aw, come on. we all know why these covers were made that way! Sex sold pulps and sexy s-f babes were required skimpy outfits whether on earth or in space. It was in their contracts. And since the covers were designed to appeal to heterosexual men, the men on the covers were allowed to wear (somewhat) more practical spacesuits. The bubble helmets provided clear views of expressive pretty and/or handsome faces while paying lip service to the fact these people were running around in a vacuum.
That said, when artists attempted to draw more realistic spacesuits there were some interesting trends. Editor John W Campbell pushed the term "bulger" for a spacesuit based on the belief that because a suit had to be pressurized it would blow up like a balloon. Supposedly he chided Kelly Freas for painting folds on a bulger. Internal pressure would prevent folds from forming. I'm not sure how a spaceman was supposed to move under these circumstances. Wouldn't he float around like a starfish?
Earlier, Hermann Oberth, a real rocket scientist, speculated that a spacesuit would have to be built like a suit of armor, made entirely of metal with ball joints like 1920s s-f robots. He believed the internal pressure would cause a fabric suit to explode in a vacuum. I think it was also Oberth who suggested a suit needed a sort of built-in parasol to shade it from the sun. Full sunlight would instantly heat the suit up and fry its occupant.
One of Oberth's ideas that carried over into 1950s real-science speculations was the notion that gloves were impractical on spacesuits. I'm unsure what the reasoning was. Maybe they believed the internal pressure (they talked a lot about internal pressure) would make the fingers too stiff for a human hand to operate. Many armor-style spacesuit designs featured various claws, clamps, and tools at the end of the arms.
Destination Moon had a terrific impact on spacesuit artwork. The fact that the movie's iconic suits were re-used in countless movies over the next decade helped make the design a go-to for illustrators. In fact the suits have held up pretty well over the years. They're nowhere near as bulky as real spacesuits, but they're relatively practical and they don't have bubble helmets. I remember a paperback cover from the days when it was a fad to show a tough guy lighting a cigarette, face lit from below by the match. One s-f paperback showed a guy in a Destination Moon suit standing on the lunar surface looking tough and lighting up...but there was no indication of a hole in the faceplate for the cigarette to poke through. God knows how the match managed to ignite in a vacuum anyway, not to mention why the smoker didn't die immediately from asphyxiation rather than dying slowly from lung cancer.
My all-time favorite spacesuit was designed by Ed Emshwiller for Robert Heinlein's s-f juvenile Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I won the book in a fourth-grade contest. The book was great fun. Its real star was the suit itself, won by the youthful hero in a contest. Heinlein meticulously described the suit's practical solutions to myriad real-world (rather, real-space) problems, few of which ever materialized. Emsh turned these speculations into a dynamite armor-meets-pressure suit design that fired my imagination. In fact one of my earliest paid comics jobs was my tribute to that suit. I credited Emshwiller as my inspiration.
One last spacesuit oddity comes to mind. After Mac Raboy's Flash Gordon turned from a heroic fantasy into a space adventure strip there was a period during which Raboy replaced standard bubble helmets with transparent pointy-topped things which resembled those light bulbs that are supposed to look like candle flames. Don't know what that was all about.
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Topic: Space helmets and shorts (Read 772 times)
