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Surviving in Space Without a Spacesuit
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.""
In the episode where they were experimenting with a captured ship, T'lk and O'Neill were flung out to Jupiter and left without a way to get home.
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.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The conscensus seems to be consciousness for 10-15 seconds, no serious injury for 60 seconds to 2 minutes.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Is it just me or does that Sunshine page prominently feature separate videos to show every single character dying? Is this some kind of gimmick?
//confused
Usually I don't want to know how the movie ends until, you know... the end of the movie.
The Chief and his wife also survived in open space for about 5-10 seconds on Battlestar Galactica, Season 3, "A day in the life".
-Eddie
Well in 2001 Dave wasn't in open space. He put his ship right next to the hanger doors creating as much as an airtight seal he could then he opened the door and all the air left his ship and filled the hanger area giving some pressure for him so his head doesn't explode but the air was rapidly thinning because it wasn't completly air tight so he only had a couple of seconds to get in. He wasn't in openspace but a low pressure envrioment, with only a few seconds of useful time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You can't forget about the extreme cold. Space is a very, very cold place. One might think frostbite could be an issue.
The Space Activity Suit is basically the same as jumping out of an airlock, but with pressure protection for your head only. As they say in the wikipedia article - "skin itself is actually quite airtight"
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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It would take nearly forever for you to cool off that much, you would explode due to pressure differential long before you would cool down, as any cooling would be due to releasing radiant heat. There is neither conductive nor convective heat loss as there is nothing cooler than you there, as there is nothing but you.
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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!
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Remember what they said though - don't hold your breath, as your lungs would rupture when you hit vacuum.
No, you would also lose heat as the water on the surface of your body boiled away. In fact, I'd guess you would lose a lot of heat very quickly through your lungs.
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.
Not only does vacuum mean truly zero air in your lungs, but your lungs are now working in reverse and dumping all remaining oxygen in your bloodstream into the vacuum. In just five or ten seconds the blood supplied to your brain is completely devoid of oxygen. That's what gets you.
Combustion reaction kinetics aren't very pressure sensitive. Oxidant density is not controlling.
Actually 946 wouldn't be the code for Islington anyway... I've friends just down the road and they're 0207 836.
Aaaand now back to the topic....
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
It's not under zero pressure; it's inside the body. Fluids not contained in the body (on the surface of the eye, in the mouth) do begin to boil. As the article explains, you typically need to breathe out to avoid major damage to the lungs; but there's normally a small residual pressure in the lungs for a small while as the airways don't tend to stay open.
This is not completely theoretical; there have been a few exposures to near-vacuum (on the ground).
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).
Thought was the "Clarke-ian" version. See his novel, Earthlight for a fairly reasonable description of ship-to-ship tranfer without suits.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
As I understand it, lung tissue isn't a one way passage for oxygen and carbon dioxide, it simply equalizes the partial pressures of these two gasses between the air in the lungs and the bloodstream. Used venous blood has excess carbon dioxide and depleted oxygen relative to inhaled air, so the CO2 gets dumped and O2 gets picked up.
h tml
In the case of a lung full of vacuum both CO2 and O2 would be dumped into the lungs. Pretty well cleaning out any and all gasses from the bloodstream, making the blood delivered by the arteries useless. I wonder if you'd last longer if your heart simply stopped right away.
from http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/vacuum.
"The time of consciousness after loss of cabin pressure is reduced due to offgassing of oxygen from venous blood to the lungs. Hypoxia is the most immediate problem following a decompression."
It would take nearly forever for you to cool off that much
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.
I'm no genius on the subject, but isn't there the case that divers have significant "explosion" resistant forces due to the water they're surrounded by?
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 blood may come out of solution and form bubbles, much like opening a carbonated soft drink. Sorry, no explosion, just lungs filling with blood and/or arteries/veins being blocked by bubbles. Very bad for the diver, but terribly undramatic for TV and movies.
1) The gloves are big and clunky because the suit is a positive pressure environment, they poof out (and apply resistance) to a degree proportional to the inside pressure. 2) While space isn't a cold or hot place (like other posters have said, you can't measure the temperature of nothing), there is an awful lot radiation in this part of our solar system--if you're not directly in the shadow of some object. So, space suit gloves, like the rest of the suit must have a shitload of insulation to keep the heat out. With the advent of better insulation, and skin tight suits that resist the pressure differential by mechanical means, suits will eventually become thinner, lighter and less clunky. Obviously, however, the hands present certain difficulties to space suit design, for many reasons.
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This isn't entirely true. Things are a little different as you begin to approach zero psi. At constant temperature, going from 30 to 15 psi, the volume of an ideal gas doubles. Going from 15 to 0 psi, the volume of an ideal gas goes to infinity.
There was an accident where divers in a decompression chamber were explosively decompressed from EIGHT atmospheres. Their bodies literally did explode, killing them instantly.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Actually, she did did say not to exhale. The episode was "Disaster", Season 5.
Crusher: "Once the air is vented, the first thing you'll feel is an extreme pressure on your lungs. You have to resist the temptation to exhale.TrekkieGod to the rescue!
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Ummm... no, you wouldn't. You would be long dead before radiation would lower your body temperature significantly.
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Ugh...that's not a pretty thought.
Reading the wikipedia article, though, it sounds like three of the divers didn't explode, but did die from the injuries sustained the fluid in their bodies rapidly boiled. The fourth was sucked into the vacated hatchway where he was "torn apart" in a rather unnerving but probably painless manner. The article isn't clear if that was due to the sudden difference of about 120 psi inside and outside his body or merely due to his body becoming entangled in the hatch as he was sucked through, but from my reading of the incident, I kind of suspect the latter. The other divers wouldn't have experience very much more rapid of a pressure change, I would think.
The primary cause of death in a vacuum is asphyxiation. So, the following article is relevant:
k /
Reviving the dead: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newswee
It is asserted that cells do not die from lack of oxygen, but terminate themselves upon resumption of oxygen, because they have been preprogrammed to do so.
It is proposed to give drugs to prevent apoptosis prior to reviving asphyxiated patients, then resume the oxygen supply. In theory this could allow survival after even several hours of being "dead" from asphyxiation.
So if I get it right, you play Go, hold both an MD and a PhD, have 5 patents and published numerous papers, and you were on the first mission to dock with the ISS, and have spent almost 26 hours in space.
Quite some credentials if I may say so!
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 drift diving (using current) and when I must actively swim.
The times of 15 to 30 secs consciousness comes from the NASA vacuum chamber accident and also seems to relate what happened with Soyuz 11 when a valve used for equalising pressure just before landing was nudged open during undocking. Again the time to pass out was easy to determine.
Holding your breath is another matter. The bits we use to physically close our tracha aren't really designed to hold back pressure from within the lungs and the nose doesn't seal (if it did, you would probably lose an eardrum). What normally holds air in the lungs is simply the pressure difference between what is inside the lung and the thoracic cavity. We change the dimensions of the thoracic cavity to breath using out intercostal muscles or our diaphram. In space the little air within the chest cavity would expand pushing air out of the lungs.
# Arthur C. Clarke (**), Earthlight (1955)
# Arthur C. Clarke, "Take a Deep Breath" (1957)
# Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
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