what happens to a human body if exposed to the vacuum of outer space?

Question

There is no data on the NASA website or anywhere else that ican confirm or deny if an implosion or explosion occurs. There is a small wager on this...

Answer 1

If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when ascending, and you'll have eardrum trouble if your Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory predicts -- and animal experiments confirm -- that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.

Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends", certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so. At some point you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.

You do not explode and your blood does not boil because of the containing effect of your skin and circulatory system. You do not instantly freeze because, although the space environment is typically very cold, heat does not transfer away from a body quickly. Loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood. If your skin is exposed to direct sunlight without any protection from its intense ultraviolet radiation, you can get a very bad sunburn.

At NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit in a vacuum chamber back in '65. He remained conscious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds. The subject regained consciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his tongue beginning to boil.

Aviation Week and Space Technology (02/13/95) printed a letter by Leonard Gordon which reported another vacuum-packed anecdote:

"The experiment of exposing an unpressurized hand to near vacuum for a significant time while the pilot went about his business occurred in real life on Aug. 16, 1960. Joe Kittinger, during his ascent to 102,800 ft (19.5 miles) in an open gondola, lost pressurization of his right hand. He decided to continue the mission, and the hand became painful and useless as you would expect. However, once back to lower altitudes following his record-breaking parachute jump, the hand returned to normal."

Source: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html

Answer 2

Why post the SAME question twice? The answer will NOT change... Maybe... it depends on how elastic your skin is. Your skin is in effect, a balloon. If suddenly in a vacuum, the first thing is the air leaves your lungs. Next, you start losing heat by radiation. The internal heat of your body will cause water in your body to "boil", vaporize because of the heat and lack of pressure. Water will boil at room temperature if the atmospheric pressure is lowered to 1 PSI from the normal 15 PSI. If you tried to hold your breath, then it is possible you would rupture your lungs, but if you did not, the air would leave and then the internal heat of your body would start to boil the water, from the surface first, progressing inwards. So, if your skin is strong enough and elastic enough, you would bloat, but not explode. You won't pop like a balloon with a pin, but your skin could rip apart because of the internal vapor pressure. You would be dead long before any water starts to boil from lack of oxygen. In the movie, 2001, A Space Odyssey, Dave, the main character enters a space pod and leaves the Discovery. He has his space suit but not the helmet. HAL refuses to let him back inside when he returns. So, Dave decides to enter manually. He opens an air lock and turns the pod around so the escape hatch faces the open airlock. He then "blows" the hatch. The outrush of air propels him into the airlock where he grabs an emergency lever to close and pressurize the airlock. NASA went on record as saying this maneuver was completely realistic and possible. The entire amount of time under vacuum in the scene was about 15 seconds from the time the hatch blew until the airlock was shut and air was flooding the space.

Answer 3

on road runner i punched up human body in outer space it brought up a couple or more sites that told what would happen to the body. they said that after being exposed to the vacum if you held your breath for 15 secs and got back in the ship that you would be ok. you do not blow up and you do not boil and you do not freeze. after 15 secs real problems begin to set in. i dont have time to go into all of this. just look it up. the site was at the goddard space center but you should search like i did. human body in outer space so you can have more sites to choose from. i thought these people were full of crap when i read their statements. have a good day. and another thing they have real life proof of what they are talking about and when these guys do theorize they do so with numbers and facts so hard and true that on a small project like this they would never be off.

Answer 4

The moment you're exposed to the vacuum of space, your body would NOT actually inflate and explode, because the body is a surprisingly contained system. The air in your lungs and digestive track would quickly rush out, meanwhile, your body's soft and moist tissues would lose water, making your eyes dry out and swell up. As more and more water (and blood from the popped blood vessels) is pulled to the surface of your eyes, it would vaporize, and the decrease in pressure would bring your eyes and lips's temperature down to near freezing. Your body would then inflate to about twice it's normal size as gasses in your blood came out of solutions and slowly evaporating away, cooling your skin considerably. Within about fifteen seconds, you would go unconscious because of the fact that no oxygen would be reaching your brain. For about ninety seconds or so, you would still technically be alive, but you wouldn't be experiencing anything. That would be the end of your life, for all intents and purposes. For a while, your dead body would stay quite warm, internally speaking, because in the near vacuum of space, there isn't much matter to conduct or convect heat away from you. Instead, you would only really lose heat from radiation from the sun, a much less efficient method. it would take hours for your body to cool down to the temperature of space, and at that point, you would be nothing but a dried-up, desiccated piece of slightly bloated and stretched human jerky.

Answer 5

The freezing-cold of outer space would instantly freeze every molecule of water in your body, and you are over 90% water! Water expands as it freezes, so that is part of the "explosion"; your solid tissues cannot contain the expansion of the water.

The vacuum of space would "demand" balance from all the gases in your body, specifically in your lungs and bronchi and eustation tubes. The air MUST leave, and it will become a fireball as it does so!

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Nuff said.

Try looking up experiments on hyperbaric chambers. That may help with the bet.

Answer 6

Well , check this out . If you go deep into the ocean you will be crushed by the enormous pressure there . Space is a vacuum it has no pressure , so you would expand to the limits of your body and then you would explode .

Answer 7

WARNING: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF VIOLENT EVENT.



Depends on the type of exposure. If you are in an environment where presure is slowly dropped, you will not "explode" (suffer explosive decompression) rather just suffocate, from lack of air. Or freze/burn depending where you are at the time.

However, if you are SUDDENLY exposed to vacum, in an instant, for example air lock blowout, then you will suffer explosive decompression (the gas in your lungs and body will explode out of you, literally ripping your torso apart. Also, gas elsewhere in your body could also explode from you (ie.. stomach, if you have indigestion at the time.)

I am not certain of the above, it is however how I have come to understand it, so don't answer an exam question with my answer!

Answer 8

In theory it should explode. Well, that's a harsh term, leak through the weakest opening.

It's caused by uneven pressure, in this case internal pressure of the air in all our blood cells and veins due to what is called "blood pressure."

A dead body probably would just stay there. Take away blood pressure and the need to push outward ceases.

Answer 9

You won't freeze immediately. Yes, space is 'cold', but your body transfers heat through molecules touching your skin. In space, there are extremely few molecules touching your skin, so heat transfer won't happen immediately.

You won't explode either. Check out the website below (I'm lazy you'll have to search for it, but it's got a lot of good astronomy myths debunked).

Answer 10

there is no vacuum in outer space due to zero gravity. it only is present on earth with some gravity presence. can a fire burn in outer space with no oxygen? the space shuutles caught on fire within the earth's atmosphere either going up or coming down?
so the question is irrelevant.