Can you survive by holding your breath in space?

Question

In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey astronaut Dave Bowman is trapped outside the ship without a helmut. He blows the electric charges on the pod door which propels him into the open air lock of the main ship. The air lock is open to the vacuum of space and has no oxygen. Bowman holds his breath until he can close the door and flood the chamber with air. Is this scientifically possible? Or would his head explode from the lack of air pressure?

Answer 1

How long can a human live unprotected in space?

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."

Answer 2

It is possible to survive in a vacuum without a space suit for 15 seconds or so without serious trauma.

But holding your breath is the last thing you'd want to do. Having your lungs filled with air would likely cause them to rupture from the difference in pressure. Your best chance is to hyperventilate first by taking several deep breaths (pack as much oxygen into you bloodstream as you can), then expel all the air from your lungs leaving them empty.

I believe this is what Bowman is actually doing in the film just before blows the hatch.

Answer 3

Here's the scoop on surviving deep space:

If you hold your breath, your lungs will expand until they tear, and then you'll die even if you're immediately taken inside.

If you make the smart choice and allow all the gas to escape from your lungs, you'll have about 14 seconds of consciousness in which to move around. After that, the blood that becomes de-oxygenated while passing through your collapsed lungs will reach your brain, and you'll be out cold. If you brought back inside at this time, you'd have a high probability of making a complete recovery.

If you stayed out longer, you'd float there, unconscious, while moisture rapidly evaporated from your eyes, nose, and mouth. The large cooling effect evaporation has would cause frostbite in about 1 minute. If you were brought inside after 1 minute, you might have a bit of frostbite damage to your exposed mucus membranes (eyes, throat, etc.), but you'd have a reasonable chance of recovery, especially if you have a hyperbaric chamber to force any precipitated gas back into solution in your bloodstream (the low pressure would cause the bends).

If you stayed out longer, the evaporative cooling and gas bubbles in your blood would cause more damage. Meanwhile, your brain, starved of oxygen, would start dying. After five minutes, you'd have almost no chance of recovery.

Your head will not expand (like in Total Recall). Human skin is far too tough.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

It is possible to survive in a vacuum; humans remain conscious for approximately ten seconds in a vacuum and have a pretty much full recovery, but past ten seconds or so your chances of survival drop like a stone. And in fact, you can only reach the ten second point by making sure you DON'T hold your breath. However horrible it may feel, you MUST let the air be sucked out your mouth and nose as quickly as possible, in order to avoid the very real possibility of a ruptured lung.

In the movie, the character is never really in a true vacuum, he deliberately tries to keep the air from the pod around as long as possible. Depending on the pressure, it may have been okay for him to hold his breath, but I doubt it. He could easily survive for long enough to get the airlock pressurized, but only so long as he let out his breath in order to keep his lungs from exploding.

Answer 6

There is no way to survivie in space without a pressure suit. Your internal pressure is 1atm and that is balanced by the pressure of the atmosphere or a slightly lower pressure from a pressure suit. As soon as you go outside in space, that 1atm of internal pressure has only the skin to hold it in place and trust me, the skin is not desinged to hold it. So you would explode.

The other way to die is of course the cold. Space is at 3K, that is -270deg C or -518deg F. Heat lost would be very rapid. Your skin will freeze almost instanly following rapidly by other parts of your body.

Most likely what is going to happen is that you would explode and freeze at the same time.

Answer 7

What would happen is:

If you hold your breath (lung full of air), the air would expand in volume by lack of counter pressure.
You would most likely be exhaling real hard, and most likely suffer tissue damage in your lungs.

What would be more realistic would be if he would hyperventilate before heading into space with EMPTY lungs.

You would suffer some minor bleeding of the smaller bloodvessels on your skin.
The spit on your tongue would start to evaporate. Your skin would loose moisture rapidly and blisters may form.

You would lose conciousness by lack of oxygen before you die.
after two minutes you actually start dying.
30 seconds will cause no permenant harm.

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Answer 8

Depending upon your age, general physical health, et al- you could survive in space between 15 seconds and 45 seconds. Theres a web program out there that asks you the questions how long you could survive space- I don't remember where it is right now

Answer 9

I doubt it would work, the blood would boil fairly quickly and regardless of how quick you did it, you would have a wicked case of the bends. I believe, if you held a large lung full of air and exposed yourself to a vacuum, the air would want to expand causing all kinds of serious medical issues.

Answer 10

If your skin is exposed to space you'd be a goner. Unless you use a suntan lotion with UV 99. However, if you are a hairy ape like me, no problem.