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.""

Re:next time

[faloi]

I'll file it along with "never eat a polar bear liver."

Re:SG-1 had a similar scene

[ucblockhead]

Lots of SF shows have done it. Battlestar Galactica did it as well.

Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea

[MyLongNickName]

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.

Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea

[Zenaku]

As per the article:

What about the frostbite? That's actually the least plausible result of Sunshine's suitless spacewalk. The cold wouldn't cause Mace too much harm in just 15 seconds, even if he encountered the very lowest temperatures in space. That's because heat leaves the body very slowly in a vacuum.

Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea

[pegr]

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...

Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea

[Anonymous Coward]

we should have a new mod: -1 RTFA

Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea

[Billosaur]

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.

Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea

[AceJohnny]

Actually no, frostbite isn't an issue. In vacuum, there is no heat transfer through convection [wikipedia.org]. The only way to lose heat is through thermal radiation [wikipedia.org].

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

Saliva boils!

[192939495969798999]

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!

Three magic words:

[Alsee]

Explosive
Evacuation
Bowels.

-

Re:2001 Movie.

[joshv]

Seeing as how the easiest path to vacuum for air in your lungs would be through your mouth, not through your chest wall, I can't see any explosion happening. If you attempted to hold your breath during a transition to vacuum you probably feel something like a sharp kick to the chest/diaphragm as all the air is forced out of your lungs through your nose/mouth.

Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea

[multi io]

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

Gah! Never cite Event Horizon for *good* physics!

[Valdrax]

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.

Re:What about vision?

[Verteiron]

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.

Re:Imagine drowning if you couldn't hold your brea

[glitch23]

Space is not cold (nor warm).

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 [p-i-a.com] 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.

Re:No, that's not right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would have been better if she had to strip down and lather up in antibacterial gel like T'Pol in "Star Trek : Enterprise"