QuickCheck: Would you explode in the vacuum of space?

AS portrayed in many movies, if you were to suddenly be exposed to the vacuum of space without a spacesuit, you would violently decompress and explode.

Is this true?

Verdict:

FALSE

Sudden decompression does not make people explode.

While it is true, an astronaut floating in the airless vacuum of space without the benefit of a spacesuit would die, the process would take minutes and not seconds.

Space is a vacuum that is devoid of air, meaning there is no air pressure.

Atmospheric pressure determines the boiling point of liquids in which liquids turn into gas.

If the air pressure on the outside is high, it forces molecules of the liquid to stay put.

What this means to the human body, is that at sea level, the air pressure is such that the liquid in your body stays liquid.

However, when exposed to the vacuum of space, the lack of air pressure pushes the boiling point all the way down to zero so that liquids (e.g blood, saliva etc) turns to gas within seconds.

This does not mean our hapless astronaut explodes, but it does mean the evaporated liquids escape the body through whichever means they can.

According to Richard Harding's book "Survival in Space," the blood vessels however can withstand the internal pressure without exploding.

So what ultimately kills our poor astronaut is not the liquid leaving his body but the air he's not able to breathe, he asphyxiates.

There have been people who were accidentally exposed to near-vacuums and survived to tell the tale.

In 1966, an aerospace engineer at Nasa, Jim LeBlanc, was testing spacesuit prototypes in a massive vacuum chamber.

At some point in the test, the hose feeding pressurized air into his suit was disconnected.

"As I stumbled backwards, I could feel the saliva on my tongue starting to bubble just before I went unconscious, and that's kind of the last thing I remember," he recalled in the 2008 "Moon Machines" documentary series episode "The Space Suit."

References:

1. https://www.livescience.com/human-body-no-spacesuit

2. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2013/space-human-body/

3. https://books.google.com.my/books?id=UMoOAAAAQAAJ&redir_esc=y&hl=en