Image: NASA
-
The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Read More »
As far as certain death in a science fiction plot line goes, being ejected into the vacuum of space is more than a pretty sure thing. A shove out of the air lock by a mutinous lieutenant or a vicious rip in a space suit, and your average movie victim is guaranteed to die quickly and quietly, though with fewer exploding body parts than screenwriters might have you believe.
In reality, however, animal experiments and human accidents have shown that people can likely survive exposure to vacuum conditions for at least a couple of minutes. Not that you would remain conscious long enough to rescue yourself, but if your predicament was accidental, there could be time for fellow crew members to rescue and repressurize you with few ill effects.
"In any system, there is always the possibility of equipment failure leading to injury or death. That's just the risk you run when you are in a hostile environment and you depend upon the equipment around you," says Dartmouth Medical School professor and former NASA astronaut Jay Buckey, author of the 2006 book Space Physiology. "But if you can get to someone quickly, that is good. Often spacewalks are done with two spacewalkers and there is continuous communication. So if someone is having a problem, hopefully the other can go get them and bring them in."
Vacuums are indeed lethal: Under extremely low pressure air trapped in the lungs expands, tearing the tender gas-exchange tissues. This is especially grave if you are holding your breath or inhaling deeply when the pressure drops. Water in the soft tissues of your body vaporizes, causing gross swelling, though the tight seal of your skin would prevent you from actually bursting apart. Your eyes, likewise, would refrain from exploding, but continued escape of gas and water vapor leads to rapid cooling of the mouth and airways.
Water and dissolved gas in the blood forms bubbles in the major veins, which travel throughout the circulatory system and block blood flow. After about one minute circulation effectively stops. The lack of oxygen to the brain renders you unconscious in less than 15 seconds, eventually killing you. "When the pressure gets very low there is just not enough oxygen. That is really the first and most important concern," Buckey says.
But death is not instantaneous. For example, one 1965 study by researchers at the Brooks Air Force Base in Texas showed that dogs exposed to near vacuum—one three-hundred-eightieth of atmospheric pressure at sea level—for up to 90 seconds always survived. During their exposure, they were unconscious and paralyzed. Gas expelled from their bowels and stomachs caused simultaneous defecation, projectile vomiting and urination. They suffered massive seizures. Their tongues were often coated in ice and the dogs swelled to resemble "an inflated goatskin bag," the authors wrote. But after slight repressurization the dogs shrank back down, began to breathe, and after 10 to 15 minutes at sea level pressure, they managed to walk, though it took a few more minutes for their apparent blindness to wear off.
However, dogs held at near vacuum for just a little bit longer—two full minutes or more—died frequently. If the heart was not still beating upon recompression, they could not be revived and the more rapid the decompression was, the graver the injuries no matter how much time had elapsed in the vacuum.
Chimpanzees can withstand even longer exposures. In a pair of papers from NASA in 1965 and 1967, researchers found that chimpanzees could survive up to 3.5 minutes in near-vacuum conditions with no apparent cognitive defects, as measured by complex tasks months later. One chimp that was exposed for three minutes, however, showed lasting behavioral changes. Another died shortly after exposure, likely due to cardiac arrest.
Although the majority of knowledge on the effects of vacuum exposure comes from animal studies, there have also been several informative—and scary—depressurization accidents involving people. For example, in 1965 a technician inside a vacuum chamber at Johnson Space Center in Houston accidentally depressurized his space suit by disrupting a hose. After 12 to 15 seconds he lost consciousness. He regained it at 27 seconds, after his suit was repressurized to about half that of sea level. The man reported that his last memory before blacking out was of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil as well as a loss of taste sensation that lingered for four days following the accident, but he was otherwise unharmed.
When it comes to exposure to the interstellar medium, you might survive it with timely help but it probably won't be to your taste.
See what we're tweeting about
23 Comments
Add CommentWhat are Anna Gosline's credentials as an astrophysicist?! Nothing is cited here...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI remember reading a short story from the great Arthur C Clarke about the Vacuum breathers club dating from 50's , It seems once more the guy proves himself a true visionary... After a little googling it seems the story is available in the compilation
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this" The Other Side of the Sky ".
After a little more Googling here is an article from 18 months ago saying much the same thing, but including a nasty account of a tragic soviet miss-hap not mentioned in this article.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=741
--
Edited by loonyman at 02/14/2008 1:24 PM
--
Edited by loonyman at 02/14/2008 1:25 PM
--
Edited by loonyman at 02/14/2008 1:25 PM
The treatment of those animals disgusts me, its not right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was a shame for the animals involved for sure, but it was over 40 years ago, so the term is "It wasnt right" as apposed to "its not right" .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRemember we have also lost 32 Humans in the exploration of space,
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0114.shtml
Its a risky business, but if we want to become space faring then sacrifices must be made.
--
Edited by loonyman at 02/15/2008 1:38 AM
I'd rather we sacrificed a few animals if it can help us gain the knowledge necessary develop treatment to help victims of accidents in the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow unbelievably cruel .. seriously science or not is there no decency in the people who perform these experiments? I think I am going to be ill. :-(
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTraveling to space already encompasses grave risk. Most likely if something mechanically malfunctions the likely hood of survival is non existent. In that regard there is no point in studying what happens to dogs and chimpanzees. The idea is to make efficient suits that are not naive to human flaw.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHmmm, robotics maybe?
Admittedly, I got freaked by the "animal experiments" part, but it was quite informative. I love my animals and take spiders outside when I find them indoors. If I am ever cast indoor space untethered, it's nice to know I'll be unconscious so quickly that it won't hurt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a pretty dumb article because it completely ignores the fact temperatures in space range from extremely cold (-200 below to 200 above) even just outside Earth's atmosphere. Even if the vacuum doesn't pose a grave threat, being exposed to extremely cold temperatures for as little a few seconds could kill anyone.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVacuum hasn't really got a functional temperature. Remember what a thermos bottle is? A vacuum doesn't conduct kinetic energy, which is what heat is. Which is why the big problem with space suits is overheating, not freezing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVacuum has particles that are moving at extremely high speed, so technically the temperature is very high. But a collection of atoms will probably be near absolute zero after a while. So space is hot. And cold.
A person being decompressed into a vacuum loses heat only by radiation and evaporative cooling of water from membranes. Most of the body will stay warm for quite a while.
Is the humane society aware of these animal experiments? Knowledge is important, I know, but at the cost of the suffering and death of other intelligent living things?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat scumbags would torture animals the way they did in the 60's is beyond me. Thanks to PETA and many other watchdog groups, government and industry get away with much less animal abuse these days. However, it would be okay with me if Bush and members of his administration were used for testing purposes. Lower life forms are less sensitive to pain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's pretty disgusting how lowlifes used to get away with torturing animals in the name of science without any public outcry. Thankfully, we now have PETA and many other watchdog organizations so they now get away with much less. University labs are still among the worst offenders and do many despicable things in secret. The University Of North Carolina , John Hopkins, University of Colorado, Palmer Chiropractic, and Columbia University are a few that come to mind that still perform experiments that can only be described as torture. All of them receive federal funding for experiments on animals, which, of course, means that we taxpayers are funding the experiments.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen a scientist uses sentient beings as if they were things, inanimate things, disregarding their pain and suffering, he/she runs the risk of following the path that led Nazi scientists to perform cruel experiments on prisoners of concentration camps. Excuses such as "this is done for the sake of knowledge" (or of the motherland) is not enough. People should know how their tax money is spent on such terrible procedures.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA really sad but true fact is that some knowledge must be won by suffering from innocent beings, as an example, nowdays we use information on hypothermia gained by Natzi scientists by dumping prisioners on icy water and finding the changes that their metabolism suffered, that information nowdays saves people everywhere where extreme cold exposure comes in play.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe it is up to us to honor the memory of people and creatures involved in this experimets by not putting it all in a black and white perspective.
I remember well how animals used to be used as subjects for really disgusting studies that were truly unnecessary for science. One can argue that it is necessary to test animals in the vacuum of space as a means of safety for an astronaut but in reality, this is B.S. We know that a vacuum will kill you in a few minutes..period. it is a no brainer. An astronaut in trouble will be saved as fast as possible which may or may not be fast enough but no one will be watching the clock in the saving. If the person survives well and good and if not, having wiped out horridly dogs and chimps would have taught us Nada. Sacrificing animals for AIDS research or cancer research is a whole different paradigm and is necessary sometimes..Exploring an engineering issue is most definitely...not.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNice Valentine. Sometimes animal models have to be used, but they should be used sparingly. In the cases discussed here the only motive I see is idle curiosity, something along the lines of, "Do babies feel pain? Let's hurt one and find out."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFolks, It was 40 years ago. Most of the tax payers that paid for these experiments are now dead.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn those days we had no Idea what would happen to Humans in a vacuum. Many lives both human and animal have been lost in the attempt to conquer Space. To (miss)quote Carl Sagan "If we don't become Space faring, We become extinct " . Thats a pretty good cause if you ask me.
And as for PETA, any group with links to terrorist organisations, and that advocates violence and arson against people because of animals has their priority's a little out of whack in my opinion.
( For the record I have campaigned PEACEFULLY for the abolition of cosmetics testing on animals and I own a cat!)
--
Edited by loonyman at 02/22/2008 11:21 AM
As with space vehicles, heating would be as much of a problem, maybe even over the short term. Any moisture would flash boil off, at which point you'd stop cooling entirely. Heating, however, would continue at the same rate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd what does this have to do with Anna Gosline being or not being an astrophysicist?
I think part of the reason the animal cruelty aspect of this story is so jarring is that it wasn't mentioned at all by the author. She casually listed off a series of horrific experiments in an otherwise a cheerfully optimistic piece. It leaves the reader wondering if these tests are still being conducted, and if the author would condone such testing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, Keir Dullea should have not survive his irruption in the space ship in "2001", when the computer HAL attepted to kill the crew...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWasn't that one of the Nazi experiments?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnimal testing in science is necessary, how else do you expect people to test out effects of hostile environments on living beings? If a person were to replicate a human body (skin, blood, organs) and expose it to space, I suppose that would be wrong too. But due to this research, we know that it IS possible to survive in space for a short time, long enough to be rescued if our comrades can reach us in time and get us to safety. Without this research, we would think that movies were based on truth and that people would explode, or the skin would boil or that death is instantaneous and any hope for survival in space would be nonexistent.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this