Behind the story: #1 Vacuum

Today we take a look behind the scenes of the story. I’ll also talk about some assumptions I made and things not mentioned in the story, like weightlessness and an orbit around the Sun. As well as why we are not freezing.

Let’s start with a little trick I did at the beginning. Although the view probably would be breathtaking, there is another reason I let you exhale. Putting you into the vacuum of space would leave air in your lung. Which in turn would expand and most likely cause your lung to rupture. If you immediately exhale, at least you have a chance to prevent that from happening. Allowing us a little more time to experience space.

A word about weightlessness

Before we look at other effects of low pressure, let’s talk about weightlessness. As we’re somewhere out there in the solar system, we’re not close to a planet. So, we’re floating with no up and down. Have you experienced it? I only experienced weightlessness once and only for a few seconds on a drop tower. Of course, there wasn’t enough time to register, if there was no up or down anymore. Another chance you might get a glimpse of it is in a fast downwards moving elevator.

Although we don’t realize it, we are not stationary. If we were, the Sun’s gravity would slowly pull us toward it. Increasing our speed until we hit it. So, another assumption I made, we are in an orbit around the Sun. Just like the other planets, objects and spacecraft in our solar system. The only chance we have to tell that we are moving, is to watch the stars. Watching them is fine, but doesn’t do the trick, as we need a reference point. Let’s use our Sun. Very slowly, the stars visible around the Sun change their positions as we move around the Sun. Like the stars visible from Earth at night, change with the seasons.

Let’s get back to the lack of pressure, as that’s a way more urgent problem we face.

Back to pressure or lack of pressure

I already talked a bit about lack of pressure in the intro. As you probably know, gases expand if the pressure around them drops. So, if you had air in your lungs, it would expand and thereby expand your lungs. Likely beyond the point where they rupture. That would have cut the story even shorten than it already is.

If we get around that issue, we have a little more time to experience some other challenges of low pressure and lack of oxygen. Like, for example, your blood vessels swelling and liquid boiling on your tongue. Both are related to the boiling temperature of liquids dropping in vacuum. So water in your blood vessels and on your tongue start to turn into gas. Within your blood vessels, this leads to them expanding and in turn your skin swelling. On your tongue, you only feel it going from liquid to gas. As the boiling is only related to the low pressure, you don’t suffer any burns. However, there is a chance, that the gases lead to a blockage in your blood vessels.

This took its time to explain and for you to read as well, probably more than 15 seconds. So if you were exposed to vacuum, you would already be unconsciousness. That’s because without atmospheric pressure, your lungs basically reverse their function. They let oxygen diffuse out of your bloodstream instead of bringing it into your bloodstream. This leads to an oxygen deprivation. It only takes 15 seconds for the deoxygenated blood to reach your brain, which in turn leads to your becoming unconsciousness. You can survive this for about a minute, but not much longer.

How did we learn all this, you might ask. Well, we learned it from theory, experiments, and a training accident. The latter happened in 1966.

Sadly, we also lost the entire crew of Soyuz 11 to a depressurization accident on return from orbit.

A word about freezing

Have you seen movies where people exposed to space immediately freeze? Why haven’t I mentioned it? Well, because it takes way longer until we would experience it. Without an atmosphere, radiation is the predominant process for heat transfer. Transferring heat using radiation, take a lot longer than by conduction or convection. So, by the time we would freeze, we would already be dead. We’ll probably take a look at this again in another episode, as heat is a topic we have to tangle with.

How to continue?

As our first imaginary visit of the solar system was neither long nor pleasant, how do we get out of this? We should start a little more prepared. But not too much, as we want to learn, what it’ll take for humans to survive in the solar system. You’ll see what I have come up with in the next part of Somewhere out there.