The fake spacesuits in 'The Martian' are almost as incredible as real ones
You'll see two different types of spacesuits in "The Martian." First are these bulky white suits that the actors wear for space travel scenes:
Director Ridley Scott called these ones the "Mr. Dough Boy suits," according to Yates.
Here's the real thing — NASA's external mobility unit spacesuit — for comparison. The costume suits look very similar.
No surprise there: Yates collaborated with NASA to design the costume spacesuits. "Can you imagine working with NASA?" she said. "It was extraordinarily exciting."
The main difference is that the movie suits are slimmed down and less puffy than a real NASA spacesuit, below. Apart from that, they're virtually identical.
For inspiration, Yates even spent a day at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where saw the Mars Curiosity rover in action from the control room. "I came out of there euphoric," she said.
Aside from the "Mr. Dough Boy suits," the actors also wore a Martian surface suit. This is the one lead actor Matt Damon donned for most of the film.
The more realistic NASA Mars spacesuits (below) were "not really Ridley's cup of tea for his vision of 'The Martian,'" Yates said. So the movie's design team took a lot more creative liberty.
Which is why the movie uses a far more streamlined design than NASA's.
Mars is more of a reddish-orange, "but Ridley loved the orange" color for the suit, Yates said. (An earlier gray-white suit design didn't look as good.) So the final product has a lot of flame-orange in it.
Yates said designing the helmets was the most challenging part. For one, helmets for each suit type had to be much larger than real space helmets, so cameras could get clear shots of the actors' faces.
Close-up shots were critical for playing up the drama and emotion in a movie. Each crystal visor of each helmet "had to be flawless," Yates said.
It's a tedious process to get a curved glass shape just right without any bumps, ripples, or other defects. So Yates hired the same company that makes Bentley car headlights to create the helmet visors.
The actors wore skull caps under the fake helmets that had a microphone-and-speaker system to help the film crew communicate with the actors. Huge lights on either side of the helmet kept their faces visible during dark scenes.
However, the perfect movie spacesuit has to be comfortable and sturdy enough for actors to make it through hours of filming for days on end.
Yates put big fans in the back of the helmets to help the actors breathe.
Yates also designed the boots for comfort. "The actors have to be able to use a hammer or whatever they need to do on the surface of Mars, and stand for 12 hours without feeling overwhelmed with the weight," she said.
The actors wore these blue tops with tubes underneath the suits to keep their bodies cool. "We would attach the tops to a cold water unit and it would run through the tubes and cool them within minutes," Yates told Tech Insider in an email.
The costume suits wouldn't survive a vacuum, but they certainly made for a visually stunning movie that doesn't look like it strays far from reality.
In fact, NASA got to take a look at the final designs for both suits — and Yates said the space agency loved them.
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