The much-heralded joint launch between NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX was postponed on Wednesday due to light rain in Florida. It was a disappointing anticlimax for the first manned space launch from American soil since 2011 — all systems were "go" just an hour before astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley were scheduled for 4:33 p.m. liftoff — but there was a silver lining to the clouds above Cape Canaveral: the world got to see, for the first time, NASA and SpaceX's alarmingly cheesy spacesuits, which looked something like man-sized Mentos dispensers topped off with garden galoshes.
While many on Twitter hailed the gear as looking "soo cool" and "so f—ing dope," the correct reaction came from one commenter who said the suits "make [the astronauts] look like stunt extras in a low budget space movie." Whether or not Behnken and Hurley find themselves menaced by rubbery Venus ghouls in some misbegotten Roger Corman epic, the suits might lead to an even graver danger: not being able to extract their heads from the two-sizes-too small helmets that Musk looks to have grabbed from his local Spirit Halloween.
If the spacemen are fortunate enough to somehow wrench the helmets from their skulls, NASA and SpaceX will give it another go on either Saturday or Sunday — probably not enough time to raid NASA's old closets for some real spacesuits.
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