What would happen to an astronaut’s body if he took off his suit in space?

Have you ever wondered what would happen to an astronaut’s body if he took off his suit in space? Would the body freeze, boil, or explode as some movies portray? In this note we tell you what would really happen and if it would be possible to survive in such a situation.

Human beings can breathe on Earth because our planet has an atmosphere, a layer that keeps oxygen molecules and other gases trapped.

Although we do not notice it, the air around us has a weight due to gravity. This force is known as atmospheric pressure and it varies depending on the altitude: it is greater than sea level and decreases with height.

Sudden changes in atmospheric pressure are dangerous to health because the human body takes time to adapt to them.

Since space has no atmosphere, it also has no atmospheric pressure. Therefore, if an astronaut stops wearing his space suit in this hostile scenario, the water that makes up our body (organs and tissues) would begin to boil and form gas bubbles that would quickly cause circulatory failure.

“Since 60% of the human body is made up of water, this is a serious problem,” Kris Lehnhardt, an element scientist in NASA‘s Human Research Program told LiveScience. “Essentially, all the tissues in your body that hold water will start to expand,” she adds.

According to Lehnhardt, the formation of bubbles in body fluids would occur faster in the water present in the tissues than in the blood, since the circulatory system has its own internal pressure.

An example of decompression on Earth is Caisson’s disease, which occurs when divers quickly emerge from the deep sea to the surface without making any stops along the way.

“No human being can survive this; death is likely in less than two minutes,” says Lehnhardt. Decompression experiments carried out on animals by NASA have discovered that the limit to survive in this scenario varies between 90 seconds (in dogs) and 3 minutes (chimpanzees).

In 1965, Jim Leblanc, a NASA aerospace engineer, was helping test the performance of space suits in a huge vacuum chamber at the Johnson Space Center in Houston when the hose supplying pressurized air to his suit suddenly became disconnected. costume.

Leblanc blacked out in just 12 to 15 seconds and recalls feeling his tongue go from wet to boiling before he passed out. The technician regained consciousness at 27 seconds, when his suit was re-pressurized and, although he survived the incident, he had loss of taste sensation for 4 days.

The only time space explorers died from a sudden change in atmospheric pressure was in 1971, during the return to Earth of the Soviet Soyuz 11 spacecraft carrying cosmonauts Vladislav Volkov, Georgy Dobrovolsky and Viktor Patsayev, who were not using a pressurized spacesuit or diving suit and a capsule door opened 170 km from the earth’s surface.

Source-larepublica.pe