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The New Space Swag

Falling from orbit has never looked this good.

About a month ago, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule landed safely in the Pacific Ocean after completing the first ever commercial expedition to the International Space Station. Granted, it was only tasked with the mundane chore of delivering ‘supplies’, but even if it were delivering a bunch of space pens and a pool table, the flight was an incredible milestone in the marriage of private companies and spaceflight.

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Aside from the obligatory excitement that comes from the realization that the future is actually happening before our eyes, I’m oddly excited to see companies blossom, flourish, and crumble under the weight of capitalism’s crushing fist. There is no shortage of big players in the space game, most notably Richard Branson and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who are both interested primarily in the Space Plane tourism route. But their notoriety, paired with their being in the business of giving rich people the opportunity to drink cocktails while literally overlooking a world of middle-class Earthlings, distracts from the fact that they are a pretty marginal minority of the burgeoning space industry. The other side is largely based in practicality, with companies like SpaceX and Boeing creating capsules that are meant to house scientists and science cargo, not just overindulgent space nerds with successful porn-media conglomerates.

This is essentially the bizarre cross-section of the private space industry that I’m so eager to watch unfold. I love the idea that both people who made a fortune on double penetration web videos and scientists with PhDs will actually be inhabiting the same environment together, and with very few other people between them to bridge this gap.

The bigger picture, though, is that the same crushing capitalism is going to push scientific innovation, which in turn will trickle into more consumer-facing badassery. Think of the Internet. We might not have breadedcats.com if David Karp hadn’t ousted Blogger with a much simpler and more aesthetically interesting Tumblr. Furthermore, since the world has been fantasizing about dicking around in space for centuries, the cultural tension between Richard Branson’s stupid space parties and genuine attempts at pursuing scientific enlightenment beyond our planet is visibly thick.

Now I’m sure there are plenty of examples of companies whose consumer driven science innovation is becoming glaringly obvious on the outside. But there’s one company specifically that’s keenly self-aware of the matter. They’re called Orbital Outfitters, and as the name might suggest, they make suits.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.