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.
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.
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
2001 Movie. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:1, Informative)
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: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!
Yup, this was a major factor in the Apollo 1 fire (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If you don't panic (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:1, 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.
Re:15 seconds? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:2001 Movie. (Score:2, 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.
Re:You can survive for 30 seconds (Score:1, Informative)
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....
Re:Umm... pressure? Fluids? (Score:2, Informative)
This is not completely theoretical; there have been a few exposures to near-vacuum (on the ground).
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:4, Informative)
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:next time (Score:3, Informative)
Re:15 seconds? (Score:2, Informative)
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."
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (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.
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:2, Informative)
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 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.
Re:So why do astronauts bother with gloves? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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!
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:1, Informative)
The interesting point was that since there was no ozone layer around, he got a big sunburn on everything exposed to the sun. This was on earth orbit.
This earned the astronaut entry into the "vacuum breather's club" which I thought was a cool name.
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:SG-1 had a similar scene (Score:1, Informative)
It's cold in space if you aren't near anything. If you are in "empty" space and far enough away from all objects to not feel their radiation then the temperature of space at that location will be the same temperature as the microwave background radiation which is about 2.7K. If you are in space and at the same distance to the Sun as Earth is then the temperature of space is about 280K. If you can't feel the Sun's heat but can receive ambient heat from planets then you are going to feel about 5K. That's cold.
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.
Post-exposure drugs could allow long exposures? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:been there (Score:3, Informative)
Quite some credentials if I may say so!
Re:You can go a lot longer than he claims. (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:An answer from the eighties ... (Score:2, Informative)
# Arthur C. Clarke, "Take a Deep Breath" (1957)
# Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Submit to the tubes and be piped to the solution.
CC.