eli5: Why is white so prevalent in spacecrafts and equipments?
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It reflects light. This is important for two reasons: first, most of space is dark, and a dark object against a dark background is particularly hard to see.
Second, dark things absorb light and get hot — which you probably have noticed wearing a dark shirt on a sunny day. On Earth, a lot of the light is blocked by the atmosphere, and you’ve got air to cool you and carry heat away – but, in space, it’s really hard to get rid of heat. It’s like being in a thermos — there’s no air to transfer heat to and carry it away. So, in space, you’d just be absorbing more and more heat until something is very hot.
It’s also true that we tend to use on the inside of spacecraft so that they don’t look so cramped, and it’s a bit easier to see small objects and things floating about in the ship (you want to keep it tidy so that equipment doesn’t get damaged or something get sucked up your nose).
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