![]() Decompression can also lead to a possibly fatal condition called ebullism, where reduced pressure of the environment lowers the boiling temperature of body fluids and initiates transition of liquid water in the bloodstream and soft tissues into water vapor. Upon sudden decompression in vacuum, expansion of air in a person’s lungs is likely to cause lung rupture and death unless that air is immediately exhaled. The absence of normal atmospheric pressure (the air pressure found at Earth’s surface) is probably of greater concern than temperature to an individual exposed to the vacuum of space. Even if you were dropped off in deep space where a thermometer might read 2.7 Kelvin (-455 ☏, the temperature of the “cosmic microwave background” leftover from the Big Bang that permeates the Universe), you would not instantly freeze because heat transfer cannot occur as rapidly by radiation alone. What does this mean for a person in space without a spacesuit? Because thermal radiation (the heat of the stove that you can feel from a distance, or from the Sun’s rays) becomes the predominant process for heat transfer, one might feel slightly warm if directly exposed to the Sun’s radiation, or slightly cool if shaded from sunlight, where the person’s own body will radiate away heat. Furthermore, heat transfer cannot occur the same way in space, since two of the three methods of heat transfer (conduction and convection) cannot occur without matter. In thermodynamic terms, temperature is a function of heat energy in a given amount of matter, and space by definition has no mass. One common misconception is that outer space is cold, but in truth, space itself has no temperature. Acute exposure to the vacuum of space: No, you won’t freeze (or explode) Meanwhile, many of these same films conveniently ignore the slightly more subtle, yet highly relevant hazards of prolonged spaceflight even in an enclosed vessel at normal atmospheric pressure. Outer space is often depicted in film as a cold, inhospitable place, where exposure to the perpetual vacuum will make your blood boil and your body burst alternatively, if neither of those things happen, you’re bound to instantly freeze into a human-popsicle. Today, as technology becomes more capable of enabling manned travel to Mars and Hollywood’s imagination runs wild with notions of humanity’s spaceflight-steeped future (with recent blockbusters like Star Trek, Prometheus, Star Wars, and even Wall-E), many fallacies about space have emerged. ![]() Since the first two-hour excursion into space by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, the lure of manned space travel has proved irresistible to scientists, entrepreneurs, and entertainers alike.
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