Crossed polars

The site is the microscope. A white lab page with black circular fields of view, and the only colour anywhere is birefringence: the interference colours a crystal shows between crossed polarizers. Every image is a micrograph; you turn the stage to read it. Page transitions are the field of view closing and opening.

The crystal is the hero, not the rocket. This direction never shows a rocket at all.
Interference colour is real physics, so the brightest thing on the site is also the truest.
Turning a polarizer is the scientist's own gesture.

Drag to turn the stage

Each crystal has its own axis, so it brightens and goes dark every 90°, the way it does under a real polarizing microscope: intensity follows sin²(2θ).

Colour

Slide glass white#f1f0ec

Field black#000000

First-order yellow#f2d36b

Second-order magenta#d25fa8

Second-order blue#5d8be0

Neutral everywhere, and colour only from the crystals. The risk is that the colours read as a rainbow, so they must never leave the micrographs.

Type

39 µm

Erode for headings, Supreme for text

Under crossed polarizers each crystal goes dark every 90° as the stage turns. That is how we know it is a crystal.

Erode for headlines, like a journal paper; Supreme for data. A serif display risks the "tasteful AI" look, so it stays upright and plain.

What we took from other sites

Where it could go wrong

Without the flight there is no story: it explains the science but not the service.
Interference colour can tip into rainbow slop if overused.

Not chosen as the whole site, because it loses the flight. Its polarizer became the lab section on the home page, and its circular field of view became the page transition.

Drag to turn the stage

Colour

Type

What we took from other sites

Apex Space

Relativity Space

Stoke Space

Where it could go wrong