Jim LeBlanc Survives Early Spacesuit Vacuum Test Gone Wrong (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Jim LeBlanc Survives Early Spacesuit Vacuum Test Gone Wrong (2012)

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20 pointsHooke12 comments

Link to actual video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO8L9tKR4CY

To be completely honest I was expecting total recall, but then again this is hn. You did good.

Here is good overview of effects of vacuum to human body (and test animals) with credible sources: http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html

Wow. I knew that nasa did a bu ch of tests with dogs. Some lived way longer than I would have expected: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196600...

I never knew a person experienced this though.

That's shocking, I'd have assumed you'd be dead pretty quickly.

I'm curious about the temperature and it's effects inside the chamber and his suit during the test.

I'm really curious about the small structures in his lungs. I would have feared them getting totally trashed by the pressure imbalance, making his lungs useless even after the outside pressure was restored.

That's an interesting hypothesis. The alveoli are delicate and highly vascularized, but then they are also already evolved specifically to facilitate rapid gas exchange, and geared to rapidly offload our CO2. It would be fascinating to see empirical information about their performance in these conditions.

About twenty years ago, I knew a guy who owned a snake that was fed with live white mice. Once, around feeding time, he and another guy we knew ended up making a bet about what would happen if the mouse was exposed to vacuum prior to becoming lunch. Long story short, it was put in a glass chamber from which the air was evacuated over the course of about a minute. Basically, it sniffed around for a few seconds then abruptly fell over dead, with the only external sign of damage being a small dot of blood on its nose.

beats getting eaten alive by a giant reptile I suppose.

Vacuum is good insulator.

Initially he would probably feel warm in the in vacuum.

The evaporation of water would cool his mouth and nose.

Could this incident have given Clarke the factual basis for the airlock scene in 2001? More than most SF authors, he liked his fiction to be broadly plausible.

Clarke’s 1955 novel “Earthlight” had suitless spacewalk as a major plot point. I think he had a long-term fascination with the topic.

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