ian (11/30/82)
Somebody asked for some facts on the `survival in free space' discussion. Here are a few facts. Not the final answer though! You could not survive in free space by breath-holding without a pressure suit. (You might, as has been said, survive the loss of a glove if the suit were sealed at the cuff to prevent pressure loss). Otherwise, the air trapped in the lungs would expand (the chest viscera being reasonably flexible) and burst the alveoli (lung sacs about the diameter of the thickness of a cigarette paper). The air which escapes enters the chest cavity, and from there will usually enter the pulmonary circulation; bubbles of air in the blood lodge in inconvenient places like the brain, spine, etc. This accounts for a high percentage of the SCUBA fatalities attributed by non-diving coroners and an ignorant press to `drowning'. Refer to Miles & Mackay, page 67, for gory details, including photographs (see notes). They further add (same page): ``In an attempt to find just where the lung damage was occurring Wright carried out further experiments on fresh unchilled cadavers. He found that the intra-tracheal pressures required to induce trauma were 80 mm.Hg in an unbound corpse, 93 mm.Hg with an abdominal binder and from 133-190mm.Hg in those where both chest and abdomen were bound.....''. Not sure if a pressure suit would provide the same effect as the binders used here; I suspect not. For conversion, 760 mm.Hg approx.==14.7 psi. It is left as an exercise to see how little change of pressure can be tolerated in leaving a capsule for free space without a suit, before death ensues. You might make it, but don't ask me to go first! ``Further support for the belief that it is stretching rather than excess pressure which causes the lung damage comes from the well-established fact that very high intra-pulmonary pressures, such as those which occur in violent coughing, can be tolerated without harm.'' (ibid, p69). The answer? Not yet, sorry, just a few facts. Ian Darwin, Toronto, Canada. uucp: decvax!utzoo!utcsstat!ian Programmer, SCUBA instructor (PADI), etc. Notes (roughly in refer(1) format). %A Stanley Miles and D. E. Mackay %T Underwater Medicine %I Adlard Coles Limited %C London %D Fourth Edition, 1976 %P 66-69 [I haven't read the following work, just extracted the citation from Mile's bibliography.] %A M. S. Malhotra and H. C. Wright %T The effect of a raised intrapulmonary pressure on the lungs of fresh unchilled bound and unbound cadavers %I Medical Research Council %R R.N.P.R.C. Report U.P.S., 189 [Don't ask me about RNPRC - Royal Navy something-or-other - ask a Limey] %D 1960