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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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).
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.
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!
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