The Man Behind America’s New Spacesuit: How Elon Musk Took Hollywood Costume Designer Jose Fernandez From Batman To NASA

This weekend, and for a while now, new dad of the entertainingly-named little boy, X Æ A-12 Musk, and footloose Twitter aficionado Elon Musk is having one of what he hopes will be a long future of space moments. It's no small accomplishment to get the nod from NASA bigs that you can carry the most precious asset, their astronauts, up to the big game on the International Space Station, and kudos to Daddy Musk, and to NASA, for that.

But, talk about a cool flight suit: Musk and his deeply pedigreed Hollywood costume designer Jose Fernandez took a couple of years to design the new NASA super-skinny pressure suits. The spacesuits certainly look snazzy, with their close-to-the-body cut, their elegant dark silver (fireproof!) piping over the white Teflon fabric, their highly articulate gloves and neck, and the black knee-high boots that seem to quote the Duke of Wellington's own below-the-knee cavalry boots, albeit ready for the wear and tear of outer space rather than that of Napoleon's cannon at Waterloo.

Mr. Fernandez is no stranger to durable, tight-fitting clothes for heroes, having worked on costumes for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, Tron, Ironman 2, The Amazing Spiderman, and Captain America: Civil War, to name just a few of his impressive credits. He was first approached by SpaceX in 2016 to participate in a design competition and freely recounts that he didn't, at first, understand that it was for a real space effort, not a movie production about a space effort, to which he would be submitting his work. "I didn't know what SpaceX was, and I thought it was a film," the modest Fernandez says.

Musk really liked Fernandez's submission of the helmet design—which is, with considerable reverse engineering to make sure that the thing would work in space—a very special piece of equipment. Fernandez is fluent in helmets, having designed Thor's and his brother Loki's awe-inspiring helmets for Thor.

In his work on 2016's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, one of Fernandez's signature accomplishments was that he was able to fashion a cowl so that Ben Affleck could turn his head. In countless Batman films, the necessarily stiff cowl had prevented the actors from doing that, seriously inhibiting their "read" in every sort of scene, but especially in action shots, not to mention how it cobbled and cramped the directors of photography or their cameramen. Fernandez also famously liberated Hugh Jackman, in his second turn as Wolverine in X2, whose cast had been so trapped by in their costumes in the first installment that they literally had to be helped up steps.

As an acknowledged master of costumes that hold to and cosset the body, Fernandez is necessarily a master of joinery in tailoring, meaning, he has the ability to resolve the often-difficult points at which different materials meet. In a spacesuit, the joinery has to be super-tight—in fact, air proof. In no piece of extreme adventure apparel is this more clear than in the helmet of a spacesuit, which—to recall the stiff, bolt-on helmets of NASA astronauts from John Glenn to Neil Armstrong—had their ancestry back in the design-DNA of deep-sea diving equipment of the 19th century.

Not so the light, ovoid, and very open-to-the-cosmos Fernandez helmet. Fernandez has not simply given his astronauts a better, less obstructed field of vision. The helmet tops a flexible and, for a spacesuit, very extended and articulate neck piece, best seen above on astronaut Doug Hurley, left, as he boards the Tesla on May 27 en route to the spacecraft before the first launch was scrubbed. In fact, some of the old NASA helmets would wholly prevent the astronaut from even contemplating getting his head low enough to get into a car as astronaut Hurley is doing. We'll get to see Hurley and his partner Bob Behnken do it again on Saturday, and again with the excellent product placement of the Musk-enterprise-friendly Tesla as the official NASA launch vehicle.

With the visor up, the Fernandez helmet resembles that of a Parisian pompeur , a fireman's helmet, jaunty and protective at once. Visor down, the sleek ovoid quotes some of Kier Dullea's very, very cool space headgear that Stanley Kubrick had commissioned for his masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. In addition, close viewers of the Grammys and all fans of disco/electronic/dance/trance will notice a strong connection in the NASA helmet to the helmets sported by the ultra-shy French pop duo Daft Punk.

This is no accident: It should be noted that Daft Punk has in fact commissioned the brilliant Fernandez for several pieces of their trademark weird-oh disco-robot headgear. But as a deeply schooled "extreme couture" tailor to all sorts of cinematic superheros and heroines embroiled in narratives whose origins stretch back to the early 20th century, Mr. Fernandez would be well aware of Kubrick's earlier camera-friendly helmet innovations.

Fernandez' NASA suits are, also, made to travel, free of the dangle and drag of all the support apparatus of previous in-house NASA designs, with the power and life-support systems relying on a single connection at the thigh. The notion here is not simply one of economy but also one of flexibility and comfort. If the suits are made more livable, as Fernandez's suits are, then the astronauts will not waste energy "fighting" the cumbersomeness of their clothes as they engage in tasks in microgravity, or at least, they'll waste less energy fighting them less.

As in Fernandez's costumes for Ben Affleck's Batman, the emphasis is on mobility as an expression of character. The body of the suit is aptly military in style, but not overly so: The epaulets are accomplished with the dark silver piping tracing the shape rather than with an actual tab of fabric, and the inset dark-silver ground for the bright shoulder patches brings an extra whiff of sleeked-down military formality, as do the "patches" of dark silver in the high-wear areas of the elbows and sides of the suit. Again, here, the joinery is the thing: The seams are deeply worked so as to be there, without being there.

The formality is no accident. Fernandez tells the story this way: "He (Musk) kept saying, 'Anyone looks better in a tux, no matter what size or shape they are,' and when people put this space suit on, he wants them to look better than they did without it, like a tux. You look heroic in it."

Looking closely at the front of the spacesuit's piping below the neck, which forms a kind of necklace that stops slightly above the sternum, just above the suits' emblazoned NASA chest emblem, we can see that the cup-shaped bottom of that necklace is drawn in a much heavier gauge of piping, figuratively demarcating where the lapels of a tux would sharply outline the bright white shirt underneath.

Jose Fernandez will be receiving no calls or accolades from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, or New York Fashion Week for these spacesuits, although it wouldn't be a bad idea. But they are brilliantly executed industrial wear, and have their witty cultural roots—as much of America does—deep in the fertile cosmology of American cinema. These clothes will walk no catwalk: As we will see at launch on Saturday, the stage they are now on is the altogether larger one of performance in extremis. In every sense of the phrase, the Fernandez spacesuits are out of this world.