Orbital

Forty-Nine Pressure

In 1965, Jim Leblanc, a NASA technician was inside a vacuum chamber at the equivalent of 150,000 feet of altitude testing a space suit. While doing a mobility test his oxygen supply tube came loose causing the suit to rapidly depressurize.

Leblanc’s only out of the ordinary sensation before he blacked out was the feeling of the saliva on his tongue boiling off.

Fortunately, his quick thinking coworkers were able to rapidly re-pressurize the chamber and get to him before the lack of pressure killed him.

Even to this day, the effect of vacuum on the human body is poorly understood. The bulk of our knowledge comes from accidents like Leblanc’s and animal testing.

Dogs exposed to vacuum would pass out after a few seconds but could endure as long as a minute and a half without permanent damage.

Chimpanzees could go as long as three minutes.

We don’t know how long a human can last before suffering irreparable harm.

What we do know is that a person will pass out within the first few seconds. All the surface moisture in the body: Saliva, sweat and tears will evaporate and the tissue in the lungs will begin to swell and start to burst.

As the air bubbles inside the body start to expand, a person’s skin will begin to swell, like my foot after the space shoe mishap. Whole body exposure in animals has been described as resembling an inflated goat skin.

Assuming I’m more chimp-like than dog, three minutes might be enough to get me from the module to the Sagan airlock if a lot of things work right. However, it would be pointless if I was passed out.

I can hold my breath for five minutes in a pinch — and in a pressurized environment. Holding your breath in a vacuum will kill you.

While I can rig one of these oxygen cylinders as a breathing mechanism, all that air won’t do me any good if my body is swelling up to ridiculous proportions, bursting my lung tissue apart.

First and foremost, I need to protect my head. Second, I have to figure out how to keep the other orifices on my body from explosively evacuating.

I search through the floating parts and find a rectangle of clear plastic about eight inches wide and three tall. This will be my visor. I tuck it into a container so I can come back to it later.

After I have my oxygen tank and breathing tube, I start building my suit. Technically, it’s not so much a suit as turning myself into a living mummy.

I start by tightly wrapping the tape over my soft shoes and biding my feet up past my ankle and around the outside of my pants.

Next, I bind my calves and thighs, leaving my knees with some mobility. I’ll put a layer of tape over them, but I expect to get some swelling.

For my groin, I pull down my pants and apply the tape to my bare skin, making a painful jockstrap. It’s absolutely critical I make as airtight of a seal as I possibly can.

As I twist the tape around my private parts I begin to realize the most excruciating part of this process may be when it comes time to take the tape off.

I tell myself it’s a small price to pay for survival.

After wrapping my johnson and butt securely, I pull my pants back up and do another pass, binding my trousers tightly to my thighs and waist.

This won’t be a perfect seal by any stretch of the imagination. There’s a reason space suits cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and aren’t made from fancy duct tape. But if this can slow down the rate of de-pressurization, I might stand a chance.

I wrap the tape around my torso until I get to my chest, then wrap the tape around my arms, leaving my elbows free. Next, I wrap my fingers with the knuckles bare. After I’m done with my head, I’ll put a layer over them last.

I’d love to have the time to make a helmet, but I don’t. The module will have re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere by the time I make something reasonably suitable.

Instead, I stick an air hose in my mouth and the clear plastic over my eyes and start wrapping my head with the tape.

I use two rolls, making sure my head is completely bound. This is not a comfortable feeling, to put it mildly. But at least I’m a little warmer now.

Three more rolls of tape are used to firm up the rest of my body where I want to minimize swelling and exposure.

Doing this while breathing through a small hose isn’t a pleasurable experience.

At last I reach the point where any more tape will make me too tightly bound to be able to move.

I connect an air tank to my breathing hose and let the gas trickle into my mouth, filling my lungs with pure oxygen. I don’t have any way to vent the air back out. My plan is to just let the valve stay open once I open the airlock.

If through some miracle my “suit” is airtight, I should have a few minutes to make it to the Sagan. If there’s a leak, I won’t have any problem exhaling the air being pumped into my lungs.

Okay, David. You’ve made your stupid suit — well, technically I’ve only just triaged all the parts of my body that are vulnerable in vacuum.

This might give me a few minutes at best. While the space tape is meant for patching a suit in an emergency, it’s not actually meant to be used to make a whole space suit — so let’s temper our expectations about the rest of our life.

I glance through the window on the hatch and see the very tiny point of light that’s the Sagan.

To get from here to there I need one last hack.

I take a small oxygen cylinder and tape it to my left forearm so the nozzle is pointing towards my elbow.

The plan it to open the airlock, release that valve, and point my fist at the station, letting the escaping air propel me like a small rocket.

As I start to turn the wheel on the hatch, I give myself about a one in ten chance of actually surviving.

What I need is a miracle.