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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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The conscensus seems to be consciousness for 10-15 seconds, no serious injury for 60 seconds to 2 minutes.
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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.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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
But the odds of being picked up by a passing space ship in that time are two to the power of 2079460347 to one against.
Technoli
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.
The decompression effects may be reduced/delayed if the space station uses a 100% oxygen atmosphere at a low pressure, then the pressure delta between what your body is equalized to and the vacuum is reduced so the trauma is delayed a bit.
The ISS uses normal sea-level pressure, but I believe some of the spacecraft used for the moon shots used the low-pressure environment.
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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two presidential candidates survived in space for a few moments after they were jettison from an alien space craft in a Halloween episode. I think. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this one.
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Maybe, but once they retrieve you, if your clothing needs to be removed for any reason (e.g. medical), you're going to have shrinkage like you just did the polar bear plunge... and all in front of your unreasonably hot female costar. :(
The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
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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I just expelled all the air out of my lungs as best as I could and it was exactly 24 seconds before it was physically impossible to hold my breath... I felt a weird kind of giddiness -almost a mild 'hit'. Sort of like when you smoke a strong cigar and inhale.
Surely, astronauts ought to have better lung capacity than yours truly?
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But there is almost nothing to conduct the heat. You can survive a long time in 40F degree air. Now just in 40F degree water and see how long it takes before hypothermia sets in. The difference is conduction. There would be (almost) nothing to carry away your body heat in space.
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You can't forget about the extreme cold. Space is a very, very cold place. One might think frostbite could be an issue.
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...
But with space being really big and all, the chances of being picked up within that time are 2^2,079,460,347 to one against.
we should have a new mod: -1 RTFA
After he came to, they asked the tech what the last thing he remembered was. He told them the last thing he remembered before blacking out was the saliva on his tongue boiling away (due to the extremely low pressure lowering the boiling point of the saliva)
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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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So did Farscape ... and if it happened on Farscape, well its 100% believable.
Actually no, frostbite isn't an issue. In vacuum, there is no heat transfer through convection. The only way to lose heat is through thermal radiation.
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
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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]
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.
A long time ago I took a pressure chamber ride at NASA to 27,000 ft. I lasted about 15 sec until uselessness (the crew master didn't let us go all the way to LOC), and 27,000 is not a particularly extreme altitude. Generally, 50,000 ft is considered the altitude at which the partial pressure of oxygen is no longer adequate to maintain consciousness. You can survive up to about 80,000 if you "pressure breathe", i.e have a rig that forces oxygen into your lungs at a lightly higher pressure than ambient, but not enough to bust your lungs.
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.
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Like mentioned many times already, the cold is not the issue. It is the lack of pressure. So, wouldn't it be like using one of those vacuum pump devices? If so, clothing removal in front of your unreasonably hot female costar could be just what the doctor ordered, if she doesn't mind a bit of discoloration...
Combustion reaction kinetics aren't very pressure sensitive. Oxidant density is not controlling.
From TFA:
"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!
stuff |
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.
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).
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[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].
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>
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.
Really, I'd say conciousness for 10-15 seconds, and risk of death approaching 100 percent at 2 minutes, based on the link. Remember, the 2-3 minutes guy was examined by autopsy.
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SCUBA divers experience sudden pressure changes in the realm of 15 PSI all the time. They don't "explode," they just get the bends. Yeah well, they never experience absolute pressures below 15 PSI though. Maybe your organs can withstand pressure loads better than tensile loads :-P
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.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
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.
You can get a pulmonary embolism in 5 feet of water if you do it right (wrong?) It actually takes a lot of work to get bent. There are a number of barotrauma disorders. Most of them occur in the first 20 feet of water.
I've been diving for over 20 years and teaching for over 10. One of the things I do for my advanced class on the deep dive is to fill a balloon to about 1/3 capacity at 100 feet and another to 2/3. Neither survives the ascent. The tennis balls crush, the hot and shaken soda doesn't fizz. And interestingly enough, it takes three or four times as long to solve simple puzzles, like opening combination locks.
SR71 crew wore full up "space suits". At 100,000 feet, water at body temperature doesn't really boil, it sublimates, both boiling and freezing at the same time.
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".
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 of vacuum exposure was only slightly more realistic than Total Recall's.
Remember, this is the same movie where that same character poked his finger into a contained black hole and pulled it back out and where people had to get into acceleration couches to cushion them against high-G acceleration but left all their dirty dishes on the table and all their pictures pinned up to the wall.
Event Horizon ranks up there with Starship Troopers and Mission to Mars as one of the worst suspension of disbelief destroying stinkers I've ever watched. You could drive a truck through the holes in the parts of the plot based entirely on bad physics.
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Couple of rolls sounds like a reasonable makeshift pressure suit.
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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The moisture on your eyes would boil off within seconds and you'd probably be unable to blink. Your eyeballs would probably swell, too, making your vision even blurrier. And then as your brain lost oxygen, you'd start to see the green lights and tunnels that pilots see during high-G maneuvers.
Note that I just made all of that up, but it's probably not too far from reality.
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I've done 4 spacewalks and during vacuum chamber training we open our suit purge valve, allowing the pressure in the suit to drop a bit (from nominal 4.3 psi) and I did feel the sensation of the saliva bubbling; it is similar to the sensation of soda pop on your tongue. I haven't seen the movies mentioned (other than 2001), but my guess about vacuum exposure is that you are more likely to be injured by the flying debris (including your own velocity as you impact a wall or whatever) associated with sudden decompression through a hatch than by a very short exposure to 0 psi. During one chamber run, I had a water line poppet valve stick open when I disconnected from the chamber wall. The water stream broke up into droplets that immediately froze, producing an impressive shower of ice particles. Over about 5 to 10 seconds, the icing point traveled up the water stream and formed a clump around the poppet valve, sealing the leak. Oh, by the way, I tried whistling while EVA and even the nominal suit pressure is too low to produce an audible sound.
Ummm... no, you wouldn't. You would be long dead before radiation would lower your body temperature significantly.
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So what's this cosmic microwave background radiation I keep hearing about that is hovering around 2.7K and was once very very very very very hot about 14 million years ago? "Empty" space is a misnomer as even "empty" space still contains particles such as neutrinos and others that are emitted by stars. If particle physicists are correct, "empty" space is even permeated everywhere by the Higgs boson which is what gives mass to all particles (the Higgs "ocean", or field as is the proper term, is a little bit similar to the aether once thought to exist in the 19th century). Be careful with that webpage though because it mentions God which is a bad word here on Slashdot. Similar to a casino where there is always a camera watching you, in space there is always something keeping you company, even if you can't see it.
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In other words, The Hitchhiker's Guide gets it right again: DON'T PANIC!
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
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.
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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