Surviving in Space Without a Spacesuit 481
Geoffrey writes "The recent movie Sunshine features a scene (echoing the famous scene in 2001: a Space Odyssey) in which two astronauts have to cross from one ship to another without spacesuits. But, can you survive in space without a spacesuit?
Morgan Smith, writing in Slate, asks whether this is realistic, and concludes: "Yes, for a very short time.""
SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:5, Informative)
Carter's dad, herself and Daniel are able to rescue them but the two have to eject from their ship and float in space for a few seconds before the ring transport can be used.
I do believe that the two had a spacesuit of some type on but not one that was designed for space. More of a general cover suit.
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:5, Funny)
Can you imagine being the next guy to use that suit?
"Uh, sorry but Jeff thought that tarantulas were crawling in his suit so he pulled his air line and exploded. We cleaned it the best we could."
Duct tape (Score:5, Funny)
Couple of rolls sounds like a reasonable makeshift pressure suit.
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No, that's not right. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, she did did say not to exhale. The episode was "Disaster", Season 5.
TrekkieGod to the rescue!
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You're probably getting modded as "-1 Troll" since there's no "-1 Illiterate moron" mod. Since I'm posting AC anyhow, here's a racial epitaph for you:
Here lies a dead Chinaman. RIP
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:5, Interesting)
But it's not that cold in space. There's not a lot of ambient heat, but there's not a lot of conduction or convection either -- you only lose heat as fast as you radiate. So on the timescale of "holding your breath" the temperature of space is not a significant factor. Likewise the radiation you'd absorb over 60 seconds is likely not a large factor, unless you're particularly close to the source (I don't recall the episode, so I can't comment on their depiction of distance from the star(s)).
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No, you'd lose heat as any liquid on your skin boiled away, wouldn't you?
Also you'd pick up heat from the sun. You mention radiation, but not how much of it ends up as heat. Doesn't the space station actually require cooling to keep people alive? I don't know what the final balance works out as...
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:4, Informative)
Fortunately as the other poster mentioned, you have relatively little to worry about with the cold - although there is an extreme temperature difference, there's also a near vacuum, which makes heat transfer very difficult (it only happens through radiation, which may not be the kind you're thinking)
The liquid on your skin would boil away, but it would boil at a very low temperature because of the low pressure. It's possible to have a pot of water boil at 33 degrees... (and probably much lower - look up a phase change diagram) Anyways, since the water on your skin would already be 'hot' enough to boil, I don't believe it would draw any heat from you.
As far as the space station and heat/cooling, it's not the best example - everything depends on how it's positioned relative to the earth/sun. I'm sure it requires heating if the earth obscures the sun from it,and cooling if it's facing the sun... The lack of an atmosphere makes places like the moon change hundreds of degrees in minutes.
Maybe that helps.
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Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:5, Informative)
I think that the injuries the dude form Event Horizon also were pretty real too - his eyes were damaged, frost, and the bubbling of gas from his blood "the bends".
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:4, Informative)
Gah! Never cite Event Horizon for *good* physics! (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean the scene where he's repeatedly screaming about how he can't breathe (while taking big gasping breathes) and we can hear him through the vacuum? Yeah, that's pretty realistic except that eye damage (especially like he suffered) and frostbite aren't normal symptoms of actual space exposure as the article states. Event Horizon's portrayal
Exploding from decompression (Score:5, Interesting)
So did Farscape (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:5, Interesting)
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I wonder what would be the effect of space engines an unprotected human in vacuum trying to get inside...
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:5, Funny)
And the best quote from that episode was seconds before that, when Carter asked whether it was possible to transport them directly from the inside of the fighter:
Carter Dad, can you beam them up?
Jacob/Selmak Who am I, Scotty?
Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your breath (Score:5, Informative)
The conscensus seems to be consciousness for 10-15 seconds, no serious injury for 60 seconds to 2 minutes.
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Interesting)
A Serious case of YMMV (Score:5, Interesting)
And as TFA pointed out you will embolize if you hold your breath above that more or less 80,000 ft altitude.
So if the acronum YMMV ever applies, it's here.
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Informative)
It would take nearly forever for you to cool off that much, you would explode due to pressure differential
No, you would not. Standard air pressure is about 15 PSI. Thus, being in vacuum can never apply more than 15 PSI to your internal organs, unless you came from a substantially pressurized environment.
SCUBA divers experience sudden pressure changes in the realm of 15 PSI all the time. They don't "explode," they just get the bends. It's something you want to avoid, definitely, but you aren't going to blow your guts just because the ambient pressure drops by 15 PSI.
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Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:4, Informative)
SCUBA decompression is different (Score:5, Informative)
You can approximately halve your saturated pressure withouth getting bends. In other words, if you have suturated to 30m (4 atm), you can rise to 10m (2 atm) without bends. If you go to the surface you're quartering your pressure which is a Bad Thing.
I've done a lot of SCUBA, some of it at high altitude (over 6000 ft). At 6000 ft, the surface pressure is far lower, so the effective decompression becomes a lot more complicated. A dive to 65m is equivalent to diving to 80+m at sea level.
In space (0 atm or thereabouts), the ratios become far harder to maintain and you would not want to be in 0atm for very long.
Bends is not something you'd want to piss about with. I know a few people who have had mild bends, even had very mild bends myself, but I also know a person who had pretty severe bends when he ran out of air at 40m or so. He was in hospital for a week or so and struggled walking for many months. In more serious cases people have died due to tissue damage in major organs/brain.
SCUBA / pressure on body (Score:3, Informative)
Your body is mostly water, which doesn't really expand or contract due to pressure. Pressure is an issue with respect to the gasses in your lungs and blood. If external pressure is decreased (1) the air in your lungs will expand, doing so too rapidly can damage the fragile aveoli in your lungs where gas exchange with the blood occurs. (2) the air in your
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Informative)
Convection and conduction will be negligible. Net loss by radiation in outer space will be on the order of 400-500W. That will drop the average body temperature about 5 C / hr. Your skin will be in bad shape pretty quickly, but it will take a day or so to turn you into a popsicle all the way through.
The joker here is evaporative cooling. Depending on the moisture on/in your skin/mouth/lungs, the human body cooling rates can sustain 10-20KW in a total vacuum. This is fatal within minutes.
The secret to staying warmer when you find yourself naked in space is to keep calm. You don't want to be sweating.
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Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. The pressure differential is what will more likely kill you, though even that will take time, given the tension of cell membranes. Combine the temperature and pressure differential and you're looking at a short window of maybe 30 - 60 seconds where you get by without major physical damage and perhaps 1 - 2 minutes with some sort of major but survivable damage. And don't forget long term effects, as you will be exposed to intense solar radiation with only minimal protection.
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Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not quite that easy. Space is not cold (nor warm). Things in space may be warm or cold. How do you lose heat in space? Well, there's no convection because there's no air. You would only lose heat via radiation, a much slower process. For the purposes of this discussion, I think you could ignore temperature, as you would perish well before a drop in heat got ya...
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Insightful)
Convection is what will freeze you when you fall in ice-cold water.
Radiation is what will cool the beer you put in the reflective satellite dish at night.
In fact, human space modules (such as the ISS, but the ISS has to cope with atmospheric drag too, IIRC), have trouble dealing with excess heat, and have to use large surfaces to maximize radiation output
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Informative)
Would You Freeze?
No.
A couple of recent Hollywood films showed people instantly freezing solid when exposed to vacuum. In one of these, the scientist character mentioned that the temperature was "minus 273"-- that is, absolute zero.
But in a practical sense, space doesn't really have a temperature-- you can't measure a temperature on a vacuum, something that isn't there. The residual molecules that do exist aren't enough to have much of any effect. Space isn't "cold," it isn't "hot", it really isn't anything.
What space is, though, is a very good insulator. (In fact, vacuum is the secret behind thermos bottles.) Astronauts tend to have more problem with overheating than keeping warm.
If you were exposed to space without a spacesuit, your skin would most feel slightly cool, due to water evaporating off you skin, leading to a small amount of evaporative cooling. But you wouldn't freeze solid!
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As he describes there, one would be unconscious within 10 seconds and would die within two minutes. This is known from experiments and accidents, not from estimations.
But death won't be due to freezing, what the GP asked and why I posted the citation.
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Note that I just made all of that up, but it's probably not too far from reality.
next time (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, on Earth, you could hold your breath for several minutes without passing out. But that's not going to help in a vacuum. In fact, attempting to hold your breath is a sure way to a quick death.
Re:next time (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:next time (Score:4, Funny)
Re:next time (Score:4, Funny)
There's only really one person who might sit in the intersection of "been in space" and "reads slashdot", so unless Shuttleworth is reading this you just wasted a minute of your life that you will never get back
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Spoilers by design? (Score:3, Informative)
Usually I don't want to know how the movie ends until, you know... the end of the movie.
Battlestar Galactica (Score:2, Informative)
-Eddie
Also, on the Simpsons (Score:3, Funny)
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Simpsons did it.
You can survive for 30 seconds (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You can survive for 30 seconds (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You can survive for 30 seconds (Score:4, Funny)
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2001 Movie. (Score:4, Informative)
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Sounds like someone needs to take a deep breath. I'm suffering from oxygen deprivation just reading that sentence.
Re:2001 Movie. (Score:4, Insightful)
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low-pressure spaceship env. (Score:5, Interesting)
The ISS uses normal sea-level pressure, but I believe some of the spacecraft used for the moon shots used the low-pressure environment.
Re:low-pressure spaceship env. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a bigger problem with that though -- if you lower the pressure of the atmosphere, but add more O2 to keep the partial pressure the same, you increase the fire hazard. Inert gases like nitrogen act as a buffer and reduce flammability. Fires in spacecraft are a big deal, which (I believe) is why ISS uses higher pressure.
The major problem with exposure to vacuum isn't the pressure anyway, it's the lack of air. Furthermore, you can't hold your breath, because your lungs aren't strong enough to hold in the air. Without any air in your lungs, you get about 10-15 seconds of consciousness.
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>> keep the partial pressure the same, you increase the fire hazard.
AS-204
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 [wikipedia.org]
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Yup, this was a major factor in the Apollo 1 fire (Score:5, Informative)
ReJust luck none of the Mercury/Gemini burnt (Score:4, Informative)
Combustion reaction kinetics aren't very pressure sensitive. Oxidant density is not controlling.
Space Activity Suit and more (Score:4, Informative)
There was at least one sci-fi story back years ago where this jumping out into space thing was done. So it is not a new plot line.
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Forget the big problem; important smaller problem (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Forget the big problem; important smaller probl (Score:4, Funny)
15 seconds? (Score:4, Interesting)
Surely, astronauts ought to have better lung capacity than yours truly?
Cheers!
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Of course, on Earth, you could hold your breath for several minutes without passing out. But that's not going to help in a vacuum. In fact, attempting to hold your breath is a sure way to a quick death. To make it for even a few seconds, Sunshine's Mace must have expelled the air from his lungs before he ventured into the starry void. If he hadn't, the vacuum would have caused that oxygen to expand and rupture his lung tissue, forcing fatal air bubbles into
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Expelling "all" air from you lung doesnt.
But vacuum DOES.
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Re:15 seconds? (Score:5, Informative)
Lungs can't extract anything. Gas exchange in the lungs is purely driven by diffusion, which moves gasses from areas with higher partial pressure to those with lower partial pressure.
In Earths atmosphere, the partial pressure of CO2 in your blood is higher than in your lungs, so CO2 moves from your blood to the air in your lungs. The partial pressure of oxygen is higher in the air in your lungs than in your blood, so oxygen moves from the air into the blood (where it oxygenates the hemoglobin in your red blood cells, thereby keeping the partial pressure lower than it would be, allowing more oxygen to be taken up by the blood than would be possible if the oxygen simply went into solution).
Re:15 seconds? (Score:5, Funny)
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Cheers!
Where we're going we won't need eyes! (Score:2)
About 30 Seconds (Score:3, Funny)
Your blood boils at low pressure and temp (Score:2)
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the effect of zero pressure is your blood boils at subzero temperature.
A common myth. Your blood would boil if exposed to hard vacuum, just like any liquid. But your skin is quite strong enough to contain the pressure required to prevent that from happening. The problems with vacuum are related to the lack of air, and the fact that you can't hold your breath (your lungs aren't strong enough to contain the pressure).
An answer from the eighties ... (Score:2)
Saliva boils! (Score:4, Insightful)
"One NASA test subject who survived a 1965 accident in which he was exposed to near-vacuum conditions felt the saliva on his tongue begin to boil before he lost consciousness after 14 seconds"
sounds like after a few seconds in empty space, things get painful and gross!
Wow, and TFA is wrong, too ! (Score:4, Interesting)
First piece of BS. No, your body doesn't use up the oxygen left in the blood in 15 seconds. In a vacuum (or, more broadly speaking, in any condition where the partial pressure of oxygen is lower in the lungs than in the blood), the gas exchange in the lungs is reversed - your blood will actually become deoxygenated while passing through your lungs. After 15 seconds, your brain will get hit by a blood supply that is pretty much completely deoxygenated - it's lights out then.
And then the part about air embolism - the pressure difference from going from the inside of a spacecraft (which is most likely pressurized at less than one atmosphere) to a vacuum is much lower than the pressure difference experienced by a scuba diver surfacing from a depth of, say, just 12 meters. "Vacuum" might sound nasty, but it's the pressure difference that is the problem here.
Three magic words: (Score:4, Insightful)
Evacuation
Bowels.
-
In space, nobody can.. (Score:5, Funny)
[The author of this post understands the negligible effects of loss of heat solely through radiation in extremely short time periods, but encourages the reader to take a break and try to laugh].
been there (Score:5, Interesting)
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Quite some credentials if I may say so!
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Also Star Trek Nemesis (Score:4, Funny)
Data jumped from the Enterprise to the Predator without a suit (or anything other than momentum to carry him), but of course being an android he could probably better sustain the lack of air pressure, oxygen and severe UV exposure no problem. His big problem was the self-propulsion.
</big_nerd_moment>
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First I find this quite interesting because I'm a certified scuba diver where we are made to feel very aware of pressure differences. You are a free diver where you breath in air at 1 bar but then go down to where the water pressure is 2 or 3 bar.
Holding your breath above water and not doing anything is relatively easy. The moment you start physical activity, then the O2 consumption goes up as you will have experienced free diving. Certainly I see the difference to my air-rate when scuba diving between dri