They are investigating an unfamiliar, damaged ship. Who knows what sort of hand holds there will be.
It's not an alien ship. This is a society that's been living and operating in microgravity environments for at least 200 years. It's a given that
every spaceship has plenty of handholds, just as much as it's a given that any building you go into is going to have doorknobs. This would be a routine expectation about any human-made spacecraft.
The ship is also in vacuum with a giant hole in the side. How do you prevent yourself from accidentally being launched out into space?
Seriously? You just said, it's in vacuum. The air was already sucked out, so there isn't going to be anything pulling on them. All you have to do is not be so stupid as to point yourself toward the big hole when you push off. Anyone who'd spent their lives maneuvering in microgravity would know how to avoid the breach the same way you know how to avoid walking off a cliff. You just aim away from it.
And if they did need additional control over their attitude, a thruster suit of some sort would be infinitely more practical than magnetic boots.
It's a safety system as much as anything, like how someone working on a scaffold has to be tied off.
Except that people on scaffolds have to worry about falling. In space, you and the ship around you are free-falling at the same rate already.
You've just officially surrendered the argument. Once you sink to insults, you're admitting that you can't win on the merits of your case. Normally I abandon the debate when the other side proves they're not even interested in listening, but I will refute your points for the benefit of any other readers of this thread who might actually have open minds.
The humans in The Expanse are not genetically engineered to have monkey feet.
They don't have to be. There are plenty of people in the world already -- from contortionists to amputees -- who can use their feet and toes almost as dextrously as their hands. Most of us don't have this ability because we don't need it; we hardly use our toes, so their muscles atrophy and they have no flexibility. The same thing would happen to your fingers if you encased them in leather every day and never used them. People living in free fall would be free to use both their hands and feet to grasp things, so it stands to reason that most people's toes would become more dextrous and fingerlike, not just those few people today who lack usable hands or who develop their pedal dexterity as acrobats or the like.
They are also in vacuum so going barefoot is impossible.
Obviously I'm referring to the skills spacers would develop in their everyday lives, living routinely in microgravity. And spacesuits can have flexible gloves; there's no reason the foot coverings couldn't be something similar.
But you also help prove my point. Magnetic boots make your feet more useful.
No, they don't. Anyone's feet are already perfectly useful for hooking under handles or the like, and could more easily release from such things than magnetic boots could.
As I already said, they are investigating a likely dangerous situation. They are in a situation where they may need to anchor themselves.
If you're in a dangerous situation, isn't it actually more desirable to be able to move freely than to be stuck in one place?
Do you want to be rotating in a circle when someone is shooting at you?
Anyone trained to move in microgravity would never be so out of control, and any spaceship would be designed to ensure that handholds and footholds were always in easy reach. The situation you posit would never arise unless the person involved were completely untrained, in which case they probably wouldn't be cleared to wear a spacesuit in the first place, let alone permitted to investigate a potentially dangerous situation. We're talking about the crew of a spaceship here, so of course they have years of practice at freefall maneuvering, and would no more be helplessly spinning in place than an Olympic swimmer would be helplessly flailing in the water.
Do you want to be drifting down a corridor, unable to alter your speed or direction until you hit another surface while they shoot at you?
At least then you'd be a moving target, and you could move
fast once you pushed yourself off, rather than dragging yourself cumbersomely forward at a fraction of normal walking speed.
Do you want your gun to send you flying backwards when you shoot it?
A bullet has a mass of, oh, maybe 9-10 grams, while an adult person in a spacesuit might mass 90-100 kilograms. That means the shooter would be accelerated 1/10,000th as much as the bullet -- hardly "flying backwards." And again, if you weren't in an environment where you could be sure of accessible hand and footholds (say, a cavern in an asteroid, maybe), then you probably would be using some kind of maneuvering thruster unit, which gives you far more versatility than slogging along with your feet stuck to the walls.
Everything else you wrote is irrelevant. They aren't on NASA spacecraft, NASA no longer exist. They are 200 years in the future.
The laws of physics don't change. It will always be preferable to build spaceships out of lighter materials. Magnetic fields will always interfere with electronics and radio signals. People trained to maneuver in free fall will always be able to move much more efficiently and swiftly with hand and footholds than with their feet stuck to some arbitrary surface. The reason NASA abandoned the research wasn't because they were NASA, it was because magnetic boots are intrinsically an impractical idea.
