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" Like any properly trained man in good health, he could survive in vacuum for at least a minute — if he had time to prepare for it. But there had been no time; he could only count on the normal fifteen seconds of consciousness before his brain was starved and anoxia overcame him."
Attila the Hun: Stop! No shoot fire stick in space canoe! Cause explosive decompression!
Zap Brannigan: Spare me your space-age techno-babble, Attila the Hun!
Outer space is not friendly. Woe betide anyone foolish enough to step into it unprotected (or unfortunate enough to get thrown out the airlock): they'll pop like a turkey with a grenade stuffed inside.
Well, that's the movie version. In fact, as unfriendly as the vacuum of space is, the body's made of stern enough stuff to stay in one piece. When you step outside, you've got about 15 seconds before you pass out from anoxia, a couple of minutes at best until you die from the same, and all sorts of nasty decompression injuries in between. (Exposed areas swelling up, body fluids boiling off your surfaces) But, you never quite go boom: remember, technically speaking, your blood is not in a vacuum: it's in you, so swelling and boiling blood only occurs toward your squishiest, outermost layer of capillaries. Incidentally, holding your breath would be worse than useless; the difference in pressure would cause a serious and fatal embolism even from the smallest amount of air in the lungs, they can overinflate and rupture, killing you even after you may be rescued.
A classic piece of Hollywood Science; in fact this is so widespread that audiences are outraged when it doesn't happen (see The Coconut Effect and Reality Is Unrealistic). Discussed in detail here.
This one can happen in real life if you get a really high pressure gradient - from above-normal pressure down to atmospheric pressure, say, or to be more precise, about 8 or 9 atm (atmospheres) to 1 atm (normal atmospheric pressure). If you're interested, Google the "Byford Dolphin" - but beware of High Octane Nightmare Fuel and Nausea Fuel.
The term "Explosive Decompression" is legitimate, but it refers to the speed at which the decompression occurs, not the result or cause. There have been numerous cases of explosive decompression on aircraft (several of which led to crashes), but while it certainly can cause part of the airplane to explode (due to whatever fault caused to decompression in the first place), the usual result for passengers is either slow hypoxia, or if they are really unlucky a chance to go skydiving without a parachute.
See Space Is Cold for another way that space doesn't instantly kill you. See also Continuous Decompression for how Hollywood Science handles actual Explosive Decompression.
Examples:
Comic Books
- Transformers: The Reign of Starscream #2 shows Starscream capturing a human and then putting him in his cockpit for the return trip to Cybertron. Since Cybertronians don't breathe and don't need pilots, they don't pressurize their altmodes' operators' spaces. The poor human pops when Starscream leaves the atmosphere.
- Poor human? At least the human doesn't have to clean a bunch of blood and guts out of his insides.
- An old Weird Science story had people vanishing instantly when tossed into space. Weird science indeed...
- In "Scud, The Disposable Assassin," The evil British Shakespearean actor astronaut werewolf undergoes this trope while in a stable orbit over earth. Since he is immortal, his body instantly reconstitutes itself only to explode again...and again, and again ad infinitum.
- An issue of Justice League of America showed Batman deliberately exposing himself to the hard vacuum of space (while in a controlled chamber in the JLA's base on the moon), exploring his physical endurance limits, or else preparing himself for the eventuality of it actually happening one day (with Batman, either is likely). The artwork was realistic in showing the effects the vacuum was having on his physical body, but he still lasted a lot longer than a normal human would've, even one in the peak of physical condition.
Fan Fiction
- In Halo: Halos in Space, when the back door of Joe Chief's ship is blown open, one of the army guys falls out and explodes in space.
Film
Literature
- It doesn't actually happen in the X-Wing Series, but after the bridge of his capital ship is breached, General Solo reflects that if the crew can't get into a pressurized area before the bridge is sealed off, they're going to experience the "joys of explosive decompression". To be fair, he might not actually know how people in space die.
- One would imagine many space-folks - especially the danger-chasing type - would not wish to learn.
- Later on in the Star Wars timeline, his daughter Jaina Solo witnesses the aftermath of a Yuuzhan Vong attack. Mention of explosively-decompressed bodies is made. Although maybe they just suffered the side effects of being on an exploding ship.
- In Godwin's science fiction short story The Cold Equations, the young woman found stowed away inside of the EDS fearfully describes what she knows will happen to her if she's jettisoned through the airlock. Although it isn't a tremendously accurate picture of what would happen to someone stuck in the vacuum without a space suit, it certainly is a disturbing one.
- Larry Niven's works tend to invert the trope, making vacuum relatively easy to deal with, usually by not having the pressure drop from 'normal' to hard vacuum in a fraction of a second unless the hole is pretty damn huge. In one short story, a ship's atmosphere escapes, when the crew are suited but not helmeted. They survive easily, because they have stashed the helmets within arm's reach; the only harm they suffer is annoyance, since they can't eat real food until they can get air and take the helmets off.
- In Chindi, a poor pilot's lungs explode instantly after his ship's hull is breached.
Live-Action TV
- Red Dwarf, "Confidence and Paranoia": Confidence, suffering from an ego the size of a small galaxy, declares "Oxygen is for losers!" and takes his helmet off outside of the ship. He then promptly explodes.
- Possibly a parody, however, or more likely the comedy of the absurd, as Red Dwarf had a tendency to take every sit-com, western and sci-fi stereotype it could and run riot with them. It is the same show, after all, that, in an episode called 'DNA', had a giant mutated vindaloo-beast that could only be defeated with lager. Not the best show to look for scientific accuracy from - but an excellent show for trope deconstructions.
- Implied (then averted) in an episode of Knight Rider: The evil KARR starts to drain the air out of his cabin with a hostage inside, saying "Have you ever seen someone explode in a vacuum?"
- In Blake's 7 there was the infamous sequence where a person teleported into space would explode. Particularly weird here because (as it was stock footage) the figure blown up was the same one every time, so it looked as if the victim turned into a doll before expiring.
- To be fair, at least the first time this happened, it was explicitly explained that this was a side-effect of teleporting beyond the safe range.
- Mentioned, though not shown, in Defying Gravity, an otherwise good show-disappointing, really.
- An episode of Space Precinct had an alien with acid blood. When shot its green blood dissolved through the hull causing the corpse to be sucked out into space. A few seconds later it inflates and bursts.
- Farscape references this in "Dream a Little Dream" when Zhaan has a nightmare about Crichton floating in space, his spacesuit visor cracking, and his head going pop, Outland-style. However, the series otherwise averts the trope on repeated occasions in which characters are shown exposed to vacuum with no explosive consequences. By the start of Season 4, D'Argo, Rygel, Noranti and Crichton had all been exposed to space, with Crichton actually surviving exposure for a minute-and-a-half wearing nothing more than street clothes (occurs during the "Look at the Princess" trilogy). Though the actual length of his vacuum exposure is uncertain, given that the scene was in Slow Motion.
- Averted in Battlestar Galactica in an episode in which two characters are briefly exposed to space, but survive, albeit it takes them many episodes to recover.
- Usually averted on Star Trek. In fact, on Star Trek, brief exposure to space will just leave you out of breath, when you would actually require medical care. They are, at least, consistent in this manner.
- Enterprise displays a notable exception to this rule in the fourth season (after playing it straight in the first season, with the same chracter no less) when Archer is briefly exposed and spends the rest of the episode strugling to walk and breathe, with his eyes completely bloodshot.
- ... which is probably the closest they've come to reality; both extremes of either "no side effects" or "instant explosion" are equally implausible.
- In The Next Generation episode "Disaster", Dr. Crusher and Geordi are stuck in a shuttle bay with a radioactive fire, and decide to put it out by opening the bay door for a few seconds, removing the oxygen (and every other gas) from the bay. The good doctor even advises Geordi to hold his breath and "resist the urge to exhale" while in the vacuum. (As mentioned above, that's a good way to get dead even if you could otherwise be saved.)
- An unusual non-sci-fi example, an episode of Castle deals with a victim of the week who dies from this. Much of the humour of the episode derives from Castle's belief that the victim must have been in space while Beckett's more down to earth about it.
- Dr. Franklin on Babylon 5 mentions this trope — or rather, how it presumably plays out in Real Life — in regards to an incident in his childhood when one of his friends got spaced by accident.
Dr. Franklin: The one thing they never tell you is that you don't die instantly in vacuum. He just hung there, against the black, like a puppet with his strings all tangled up — or like one of those old cartoons where you run off the edge of a cliff and your legs keep going. You could see that he was trying to breathe, but there was nothing. And one thing I remember when they pulled in his body — his eyes were frozen. [long pause] A lot of people make jokes about spacing somebody, about shoving somebody out an airlock. I don't think it's funny. Never will.
- Shown as one of the two principal problems with fishing from high orbit in Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the other being the absurd length of line and amount of reeling in needed): by the time you've reeled the fish up to your space station, it'll have been shredded and ruined by escaping fluids.
Tabletop Games
- The Paranoia mission "Clones in Space" is infamous for including an Explosive Decompression Table. This being Paranoia, of course you die, but you can roll dice to randomly vary the exact manner in which you do so (exploding, charring, freezing, all of the above...)
Video Games
Web Comics
Western Animation
- Used when The Simpsons' Itchy and Scratchy go into space. Scratchy's head blows up like a balloon; it explodes when Itchy pricks it with a pin.
- Also when Homer and Bart accidentally board a shuttle of famous people headed for the sun, then jump out the airlock to get away from Rosie O'Donnell. They blow up and pop like balloons.
- Although they then got it right(er) in one of the Treehouse of Horror episodes when Homer accidentally fires Bill Clinton and Bob Dole into space - they struggle for a bit, then expire.
- Played for laughs in Sealab 2021, where a couple people from Spacelab fall victim to this.
- In the Robot Chicken episode "Maurice Was Caught", little orphan Annie is given Mars for her sweet sixteen party, and upon visiting it, trips and loses her space suit helmet. Guess what happens?
- Brock Sampson gets briefly exposed to the vacuum of space in The Venture Bros., but survives due to his Made of Iron nature.
Real Life
- The aforementioned Byford Dolphin accident is perhaps the only real case of truly Explosive Decompression. Be warned that the results are not for the faint of heart or those with an overly graphic imagination.
- If the airliner you're in decides to dismantle itself at 30,000 feet you can expect ruptured lungs to be one of the clues that an in-flight breakup occurred during your autopsy. BOAC Flight 781 is one of the more notorious explosive decompression to occur on a civilian airliner. Aloha Airlines Flight 243 did demonstrate that such an event is not necessarily completely fatal.
- And it should be pointed out that an explosive decompression event on an aircraft can also kill in other ways. Consider, for example, Turkish Airlines Flight 981, in which an improperly locked cargo door on a DC-10 opened by itself while the plane was in mid air. The resulting pressure differential between the passenger cabin and the cargo bay immediately underneath caused the floor to buckle, severing numerous flight control systems. The plane almost immediately entered into an unrecoverable nosedive, with predictable results.
- The Nazis did explosive decompression experiments, as if you needed another reason to hate them.
- As did Japanese scientists working on in Unit 731.
- There is a myth that has been circling the US military for several years about a Sabot round fired from an Abrams tank into an M-113 with a sheep inside creating an explosive decompression that sucked the sheep through the exit hole but left the vehicle mostly intact. It is most likely a fabrication produced by the Army's Rumor Mill, as a Sabot round uses shrapnel from the armor it displaces to destroy its target, and the targets are anything but intact afterwards.
- Sabot rounds do, infact, cause atmospheric events within the afflicted target. HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Armor) shells are used to create "spalling" of armor in vehicles. The effect of Sabot darts is due to the air compression ahead of the darts (part of the cause of sonic booms). The environment of the vehicle compresses due to the strict confines of the interior and are then given a release point when the dart exits. It was a common site to see poorly maintained tank turrets "pop" during both Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The sheep myth is a confusion with sabot testing and effects on armor testing that occurred at roughly the same time.
- An interesting note from a passenger on a plane which had a hole ripped in it in flight in 2011. A passenger noted:
"The crew was pretty calm about it. They walked around and checked on everyone," he said. "But it wasn't like the movies where papers get sucked out of the hole, but you could feel it and hear the noise."
- The crew of the spacecraft Soyuz 11 were killed when the ship's cabin depressurized during reentry. A valve was jolted open during the jettison of the service module causing the cabin's atmosphere to be gradually sucked into space. Their fates were not known until the craft landed (the ground crew lost contact before the fatal incident, which happens normally) CPR was attempted by support crews on the dead Cosmonauts to no avail.
I say pressure drop
Oh pressure
Oh yeah, pressure gonna drop on you!
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