You’ve seen it in a thousand sci-fi movies: an astronaut is ejected into space and freezes instantly, then shatters like an ice cube.
A hairline crack appears in a helmet, and a character asphyxiates in seconds, desperately pawing at their spacesuit as they sink to their knees, and their skin turns blue. Maybe a sleek ship is being chased by enemy fighters through a dense asteroid field, and one of them smashes into a massive space rock and is explosively atomized.
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Explosive vacuum exposure — the most misunderstood killer
Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) suffers the effects of the Martian atmosphere in the sci-fi movie “Total Recall” (Image credit: Tri-Star Pictures)
The movie myth perpetuated by classics like “Total Recall” (1990) and “Mission To Mars” (2000) is that exposure to the vacuum of space would cause your body to immediately atomize and explode or, alternately, flash freeze to a solid block of ice the moment you leave a space with atmosphere.
“Contrary to many depictions, you will not explode,” said Dr. Bennett.
The reality, according to NASA vacuum exposure research (including accidental chamber exposures), is actually more grim. First, you’d lose consciousness due to a lack of oxygen to the brain. Then, through a process called ebullism, your bodily fluids would begin to boil due to a lack of surrounding pressure. However, contrary to many portrayals, your skin wouldn’t burst right away. Skin is elastic enough to permit significant expansion with bursting.
That’s about all the good news, though. Your saliva and tears would boil, and your tongue would swell, while nitrogen in your blood would begin to escape and form bubbles. Those bubbles would block blood vessels, stretch and tear tissue, and trigger clotting and inflammation.
“If you were rescued within a minute or so of being in space without a spacesuit, you’d have a good chance of survival,” Bennett explains. However, unless you were able to reach a pressurized environment within 60 to 90 seconds, you’d die a particularly agonizing death that’s closer to drowning than exploding.
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Radiation — the unsung assassin
An illustration shows a supernova erupting creating bursts of cosmic rays (Image credit: Getty Images)
In most science fiction, characters often shrug off cosmic radiation or never acknowledge its dangers (or in the case of the Fantastic Four, gain super powers). In real space travel, however, or for anyone living off-world long term, coping with cosmic and solar radiation would be one of the most crucial considerations for survival.
Radiation in space stems from three primary sources: galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), high-energy charged particles emanating from supernovas or other cosmic events, and solar particle events (SPEs) — bursts of particles released by the sun during solar flares or coronal mass ejections, and Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped zones of charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field.
Intense solar storms could subject you to acute radiation poisoning even through protection that would normally shield you from standard ambient radiation. If you were exposed to the effects of a solar flare without any shielding, you’d rack up a lethal dose anywhere between hours and a few days.
Even outside of acute exposure, the long-term effects of radiation would take their toll, almost regardless of how well you attempted to shield yourself from its effects. Instead of a withering blast that annihilates you instantly, the real killer would be a highly elevated risk of cancer and degenerative diseases over time.
Suffocation and CO₂ poisoning inside spacecraft — the real threat
Screenshot from the 2015 movie “The Martian” (Image credit: 20th Century Fox)
Sci-fi tends to depict highly dramatic deaths in a vacuum as the main danger of space travel. The real threat, however, happens inside the vehicles and habitats built to protect us.
In response to the question of what would likely kill you first in space, Dr. Benett says “The answer is the asphyxiation from lack of oxygen.”
Take the real events aboard the Apollo 13 shuttle in April of 1970. When an oxygen tank exploded, the entire crew was forced to move into the cramped lunar module to survive. Designed to support two people for two days, the module would now need to accommodate three people for almost four days, leading to a critical buildup of carbon dioxide from the astronauts’ breathing.
To survive, the Apollo 13 crew had to improvise a CO₂ scrubber from the materials on hand, things like plastic bags, cardboard and tape. While they survived, it showcases the danger of being unable to recycle breathable air inside living spaces.
The inability to provide adequate oxygen and remove CO₂ from the air would lead first to confusion, panic and eventually the loss of consciousness. Eventually, hypoxia would set in, causing damage to brain cells within minutes, permanent brain damage between four and six minutes, and finally major organ failure and death.
Micrometeoroids and orbital debris — when space fights back
An illustration of orbital debris floating above Earth’s atmosphere in space. (Image credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)
Typically, when asteroids come up in space movies, it’s because an agile fighter is dodging massive space rocks in a dense belt of them, trying to escape galactic cops/enemy fighters/the Empire. In movies, space debris is not only visible, but it’s sometimes so large that ships can dock on it or disappear inside. Lightning-quick evasive maneuvers lead to pursuit ships slamming into huge stones and exploding into clouds of ignited gases.
In reality, collisions in space are extremely rare but incredibly dangerous. They also tend to happen on a much smaller scale. The danger isn’t from huge visible objects but rather from debris the size of paint chips, which can pierce windows (or space suits) or damage vital systems.
Objects circling Earth typically move at around 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour), and there are millions of micrometeoroids in the form of naturally occurring bits of rock and metal from comets and asteroids, as well as pieces of human-made debris in orbit. At that velocity, an impact would generate what’s called a hypervelocity shock and would instantly vaporize the object as well as part of whatever it strikes.
On a spacecraft, this could not only puncture windows but also lead to internal spallation, where fragments break off inside the cabin. It could cause sudden air loss or decompression and damage cooling, power, or life support systems.
Instead of a cinematic explosion killing everyone on board, the most realistic outcome would be abrupt and procedural. Cascading system failures would lead to a race against time to seal compartments and preserve breathable air, though decompression would often happen too quickly for the crew to react. We actually see this accurately depicted in 2000’s excellent sci-fi horror flick “Pitch Black”, where the ship carrying the cast is struck by a micrometeoroid shower, killing the captain and forcing it to crash land on the planet
Space is the patient killer
Gorgeous. And deadly. (Image credit: NASA)
Far from the cinematic deaths that sci-fi movies promise, real space tragedies would much more likely unfold over time. They’d be heralded not by rippling explosions or flash frozen corpses floating against a tapestry of stars, but instead by oxygen, almost imperceptibly slipping away or radiation slowly accumulating in our cells over years.
Survival beyond Earth won’t hinge on heroics as much as planning, engineering and being as methodical as the threats deep space presents. Now, that was all a bit dark, so we’re off to enjoy a nice sci-fi movie laser battle.