After an initial rush of air surged out, the vacuum would continue to pull gas and water vapor from your body through your airways. 'No human can survive this - death is likely in less than two minutes,' Lehnhardt said.Īccording to NASA's bioastronautics data book, the vacuum of space would also pull air out of your lungs, causing you to suffocate within minutes. What does it take to become an astronaut? What will happen to Earth when the sun dies? Some of them then lost control of their bladders and bowel systems, and the swelling in their muscles constricted blood flow to their hearts and brains, as their expanded muscles acted as a vapor lock. A 2013 review in the journal Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance that looked at previous exposures to vacuums in animals and humans found that they lost consciousness within 10 seconds. For suit-less astronauts, the blood flowing through the veins boils less quickly than water in the tissues because the circulatory system has its own internal pressure, but massive ebullism in the body's tissues would result rapidly. The formation of gas bubbles in bodily fluids, known as an ebullism, also occurs in deep-water scuba divers who surface too quickly because they go from an underwater environment of high pressure to low pressure at the water's surface. 'As I stumbled backwards, I could feel the saliva on my tongue starting to bubble just before I went unconscious, and that's kind of the last thing I remember,' he recalled in the 2008 'Moon Machines' documentary series episode 'The Space Suit.'

At some point in the test, the hose feeding pressurized air into his suit was disconnected. In 1966, an aerospace engineer at NASA, Jim LeBlanc, was helping to test the performance of spacesuit prototypes in a massive vacuum chamber. Some humans have actually been exposed to near-vacuums and survived to tell the tale. 'In essence, all of your body tissues that contain water will start to expand,' he said. In the absence of pressure, liquid water in our bodies would boil - changing immediately from a liquid to a gas. Kris Lehnhardt, an element scientist for the Human Research Program at NASA, told Live Science. 'As you can imagine, given that 60% of the human body is made up of water, this is a serious problem,' Dr.

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