I had a dream...

Last night, that I went up into space, it was a rapidly decaying orbit so I would guess about the same height as SS1. I climbed out of the rocket and held my breath and then climbed back into the rocket, closed the hatch and breathed again. It was quite cold and my dream. (No Space suit, just normal clothes).

Anyways, my question. What is the temperature at 100km up? Would I have been able to do this manouever?

PS. Yes, I know I sound like a freak.

100 km above sea level, the air is so thin that the pressure gradient would have, in no particular order:

Frozen the blood vessels in your lungs when you breathed in, causing massive internal haemmoraging, which shortly thereafter would have frozen up, causing un-repairable damage to your lungs.

The blood vessels in your eyes would burst, turning your eye balls black, shortly before themselves freezing.

Your eardrums would burst, causing (yes, you guessed it) more haemmoraging in your ears, and also somewhat incidentally (since you'd be dead), a complete loss of balance for life if you ever did manage to survive.

In reality, you'd be dead in less than a second. It would be extremely painful, but at least wouldn't last long. There would be no climbing back into the capsule. In fact, you'd probably be dead before you ever even got out.

In response to Sev.

Nonsense...That's a bunch of BS.

Actual experiments with monkeys performed by the USAF
in a vacuum chamber reveal that [ cruelly] the monkeys
actually took over a minute to die in a hard vacuum.
Oh yes! Joseph Mengele performed very similar experiments on humans
[concentration camp victims]
You can search for this info at
www.google.ca, assuming you know how to search.

haha..... that sucks for the victims. the main problems are probably a) explosive decompression (if you have an airlock this isn't necessarily a huge problem, though you'll probably get the bends anyways) and b) that you'll wind up with cold burns over your whole body unless your clothing is a really good insulator, then just on your exposed skin. dry ice is a whole -150C (correct me if that's off more than a little), and it burns you after only a few seconds of contact on a small area, space is alot colder and alot bigger.

Exposure to vacuum is *not* the same as touching dry ice. In a vacuum, there's no heat loss by conduction or convection, only radiation. You would freeze eventually (the parts of you out of direct sunlight) but you'd definitely suffocate first

I don't think bends are imminent, the pressure gradient is nowhere near of what divers must endure; the shirt-sleeve conditions require minimum of about 0,7 bar atmosphere (equals 7 meters of water) , even less with a proper oxygen partial pressure.

The comparison with dry ice and space is silly. Vacuum is an insulator; the only way to lose heat is through infrared radiation. You will get sunburns though.

BTW, Dry ice is about -79 C

I can see Stellvia and Vendigo bet me to the post.

I'm going with virgair on this one. The short term exposure will not do a lot of damage to the human body. And this damage will vary depending on the air pressure of the ship before you decompress.

Is the air pressure 15 psi or is it the min 4 psi.
Oxygen depravation will probably kill you well before the bends start showing up.

For freezing you will need a cold liquid or a solid to cause a raped temperature change. Space acutely acts like an insulator (check ISS heat dissipation problem over at NASA). You will get a skin temperature change as the oxygen and water vapor pull away from you skin but this will stop when all of it is dissipated. Then the only thing left is radiant heat and a little evaporation as water and oxygen migrates throw you skin and this will be countered by the blood rushing to you skin raising the temperature back up. By the way you will be dead long before you skin losses enough heat threw radiant heat for you skin to freeze. This will be like getting out of a hot tub on a snowy day. You skin should have no problem holding a pressure of 4-15 psi.

Your lungs will fell like as if you take a deep breath of cold mountain air in the morning. Then it will warm up just like you skin for the same reason. At the low psi change you should have very little bleeding if any at all. Higher you go with the psi change the more likely you will have some bleeding but not a life ending bleeding fest. Also you lungs will collapse as the pressure from you body press in providing some protection from the vacuum of space.

For you eye and ears.
You ears should adjust to the pressure change if you don’t do a raped decompression but you should get some presser on the ear drums and gurgling in you nasal passages as the pressure is relived. For the eye you vision should become deformed from the pressure change but I don’t know how much pressure change the eye can take before rupturing? Also this part of the body can be most effected from evaporation do to the moister that covers the eye.

P.S. This is in theory only so don’t bet you life on the info.

More here: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_147.html

My bad, I stand corrected. Although I still think you would never survive to reach the atmosphere.

lol..... i guess i was wrong , with the explosive decompression i was thinking the rapid departure of air from the cabin just from opening the hatch might screw you up. i guess i was thinking -150F for dry ice too. oh well.

By the way with the blood rushing to you skin you will start to look like a pinkish red version of the sta-puff marshmallow man or a woman retaining water.

Just think we can sell trips for instant rankle removal.

You might last a bit longer by taping up your torso tightly with duct tape prior to leaving the SS1 (as well as taping up the eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth... poor man's space suit)

With a respirator unit that covers the face and ears and some well placed ace bandages (instead of the duct tape) “read this http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6284642 you may have the start of some thing.

Well, you need enough oxygen to prevent your body from crapping out on you during your descent, and you need enough pressure all over so that you can breathe the oxygen without suffering a ruptured lung or other interesting problems. You can't hold your breath because your lungs will just a-splode.

Dono. It's like deep free-diving. There's a definate limit of survival that might be acomplishable, falling from altitude. You could try stretching it as far as you can, but it would be nice to regain consciousness before you reach the ground.

Now, there is quite the thing for skinsuits -- which they alluded to in the article, but they've been working on for quite some time.

The problem is, without forcing the oxygen into your lungs, above ~15k feet, you won't be able to inhale properly. And above a certain point, there's enough of a difference that your lungs will explode (which is hard to survive). Apparently, the emergency oxygen masks in an airliner are barely effective and you should (I love this line) "plan on waking up with a slight headache after the crew has completed the emergency descent."