Facts Versus Hollywood: Space Vacuum and Bullets

You watch sci-fi movies and you see characters face the possibility of death from getting stuck outside the spaceship/space station or have a rupture in their space suit that causes all the air from their pack to bleed in the vacuum of space.  Tension ramps up; we fear for them; we know that if they don’t do something soon, they’ll pop like an overblown balloon!

Umm...wrong.

That’s where the science and the fiction deviate. 

Watching movies and television conditions us to expect certain possible outcomes which, in truth, are myths wrongly perpetuated by Hollywood because someone, somewhere back along the creative line, assumed something and it wasn’t accurate.

Two of the most commonly held misconceptions are that if someone were trapped in the vacuum of space they’d rupture open; and that when someone is shot they go backwards from the impact of the round hitting them.

When it comes to people suffering a gruesome death in the vacuum of space, let scientists tell the tale.  It’s actually far more gruesome than anything Hollywood had conceived.  According to the good folks over at I F***ing Love Science, a series of catastrophic events would ravage your body before you croaked.  The loss of external pressure around your body would lower the boiling point of bodily fluids, like blood and cerebrospinal fluid, such that bubbles would start forming (similar to “the bends”).  Because of these bubbles, the pain would be intense.  Then you’d swell up, likely to twice the normal size, but because of skin’s elastic properties, you won’t rupture.  But you’ll wish you had. 

As for oxygen in the this vacuum, forget trying to hold your breath.  All you would do is cause your lungs to rupture from the increased pressure inside them trying to race to those areas of lower pressure.  Not a pretty way to go.  And even if you expelled as much air as possible from your lungs to prevent such a catastrophic organ failure, you probably won’t have more than 15 seconds or so of consciousness; death would follow in about one to two minutes. 

In that one to two minutes span, should be picked up before you die, your body will be bombarded by radiation galore – X-Rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet – to such an extent that cancer is inevitable.

The good writer at IFLS recaps it this way:  “In sum- you’d swell up, burn, mutate, pass out and your lungs might explode. Lovely.”

Yeah.

As for the other matter – what happens when a person is struck by a bullet – we have videographic evidence for that; no need for speculation.  Video footage of the D-Day Landings in the 1^st Infantry Division sector of Omaha Beach show the moment one American soldier pays the ultimate price.  There is no great flailing of the arms; no falling backwards and sprawling out; nothing dramatic.  He just falls in mid-stride and crumples to the ground.  It’s quick and over with.  (At the 39:04 minute mark in this video, watch the soldier furthest left: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN4dxsvOc_k.)

So there are two Hollywood-created myths that don’t quite “gee haw” with reality.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/what-would-happen-your-body-space-without-spacesuit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN4dxsvOc_k