Improvised Microgravity Maneuvering

CDR Lewis: I can't see you having any control if you did that. You'd be eyeballing the intercept using a thrust vector you can barely control.
Watney: Yes, yes, those are all very good points. But... consider this: I'd get to fly around like Iron Man.

— The Martian, on Watney's idea to puncture his EVA suit's glove

A form of MacGyvering where the hero creates thrust to push themselves through the microgravity of space with something other than a designated-purpose thruster. Of course, since there's no air resistance in the vacuum of space, almost anything will do. Thank you, Newton's Third Law!

One common version is to use your airtanks for this, which has bonus dramatic possibilities, because if it doesn't work, you now have less air than when you started.

Gas-Cylinder Rocket and Recoil Boost are sister tropes that are not confined to space. Often used to escape Dramatic Space Drifting.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Spike Spiegel uses the recoil from his pistol as an improvised thruster to reach safety in the seventh episode of Cowboy Bebop, "Heavy Metal Queen", after being forced to bale out of his Swordfish in hard vacuum.
• Goku in Dragon Ball Z uses a Kame Hame Hadouken to move his spaceship enough to dodge a threat.
• At the conclusion of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency, Kars creates air jets on his body to give him a bit of impulse in an attempt to reenter the Earth's atmosphere after being launched into space by a volcano. However, it fails: the pressure release from the air jets causes them to become cold enough to completely freeze over, and his trajectory doesn't change much.

Comic Books

• When the Fantastic Four get stuck in space thanks to the Baxter Building being launched into space (and then blown up) Reed Richards has Sue, who is keeping them all alive with her forcefield, open up a very small hole in said field. It lets a little of their air out, but very slowly—and helps them get back to terra firma.
• In Power Pack, Alex manages to push himself around while degravitized using just about anything he can find with a spray nozzle, though he gets the most mileage out of a fire extinguisher.
• Some Star Wars (Marvel 1977) comics have firing blasters as propulsion.

Film — Animation

• In Titan A.E., during the first escape sequence from the Drej, Captain Korso shoots the artificial gravity module to turn off the gravity, then uses recoil from his pistol to propel himself away. Later, after escaping the space station and finding themselves adrift in vacuum, he and Cale use a fire extinguisher to maneuver back to their ship.
• The Transformers: The Movie: In space, Galvatron propels himself towards his ship with a continuous blast from his Arm Cannon.
• Russell from the movie Up used a leafblower to propel himself while he was "technically" weightless, having several balloons tied to him.
• In one of the signature scenes of WALL•E, Wall-E and Eve "dance" through space outside the Axiom. Wall-E uses a fire extinguisher, while Eve can propel herself.

Film — Live-Action

• In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave Bowman uses the explosive decompression of the air inside his travel pod to return to the Discovery's airlock.
• In Destination Moon, one astronaut turns an oxygen tank into an improvised thruster jet to rescue an adrift crewmate.
• In Event Horizon, one of the characters, stranded outside the ship, uses the remaining air in his spacesuit as a rocket in order to get back to the air lock.
• Gravity. A fire breaks out on the International Space Station, and when Ryan Stone tries to extinguish it the thrust of the extinguisher slams her against the bulkhead, knocking her unconscious for a moment. This becomes a Chekhov's Gun when she later uses the extinguisher to maneuver herself to another space station. And when the charge in THAT runs out, she flings it away to propel herself the few precious inches needed to grasp her objective.
• In In Like Flint, Derek Flint uses a "sonic amplifier" to maneuver in space.
• Used twice in the climax of The Martian. Once by the Hermes when it blows out an airlock door to slow down enough to intercept the MAV, and then by Watney when he pokes a hole in his suit glove to accelerate to Lewis' position when her own safety line won't reach him. In the book, the second use was suggested, but ended up not being necessary.
• In Nutty Professor II: The Klumps the protagonist has an Imagine Spot in which he's floating inside a space capsule and must press an out-of-reach button. He manages to propel himself across the space by farting.
• In Passengers (2016), Jim finds himself floating away while holding a piece of heat shield he doesn't need any more. He throws it away from him, hard, as a one-off effort to change direction.
• In Sunshine, the crew escapes the Icarus I by opening the airlock and letting the escaping air blow them across the gap, similar to the scene in 2001.

Literature

• Alex Rider: During the climax of Ark Angel, Alex finds himself unable to reach anything while floating around on a space station, and resorts to taking his shoes off and throwing them.
• One Bolo short story has a Bolo use the recoil from its Hellbore as a propulsion unit.
• In "C-Chute", aliens have captured an Earth spaceship, so one character has to exit the ship via the eponymous chute and make his way in a spacesuit around the outside of the hull to the bridge. There's a danger he will be thrown free if the maneuvering nozzles fire while he's doing this, so he takes an extra oxygen tank with a regulator valve in case it's needed for this trope. He turns out using it as an Improvised Weapon instead.
• In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, said elevator finds its way into orbit with Charlie and his family inside. They try swimming at first, then Mr. Wonka suggests they try blowing in order to jet themselves about.
• In The Expanse novel Nemesis Games, Naomi uses her one remaining shoe as a reaction mass to move around in freefall after escaping her captors' spaceship without a spacesuit.
• In the Gaea Trilogy, while not in space, the hub of Gaea is basically in zero gee. To escape from it near the end of Wizard, Cirroco throws every object she was carrying in the opposite direction — and curses herself for throwing her gun without firing its ammo first. It's a good thing she didn't, though, because at the end of her ride she's headed toward the ground too fast.
• In The Integral Trees, the tree-dwellers occasionally use high pressure "spitter" seedpods (that shoot seeds out once they are broken open on one end) as rocket motors.
• In Poul Anderson's short novel The Makeshift Rocket (also known as A Bicycle Built for Brew), the hero used a goofball contraption consisting of a spacesuit, several lashed-together crates, and a rocket motor that uses the gas from agitated beer barrels for propulsion.
• In the Isaac Asimov short story "Marooned Off Vesta", the characters maneuvered by cutting a hole in a water tank and using the escaping water as thrusting mass.
• In the Priscilla Hutchins novel Chindi, the protagonists have to catch an alien ship that's traveling faster than any human ship can, so they strap a ship to a huge boulder (small asteroid), and then release it in hyperspace, which gives them just the boost they need.
• Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Sands of Mars featured an astronaut who once managed to stop and get stuck in the middle of a room. He eventually started throwing clothing the opposite way. That and a very badly timed VIP tour explain why he's stuck in the space boonies during the events of the novel.
• In the Donald A. Wollheim juvenile The Secret of Saturn's Rings, not only does young Bruce Rhodes cross the Cassini Division from his wrecked spacecraft to where his father is stranded with nothing but a tank of helium, he finishes up his journey by jumping from ring particle to ring particle.
• In "Equipment", a short story accompanying the novel Shatterpoint, a number of Republic troops find themselves adrift in space after their Drop Ship is shot down trying to reach the planet below. Harassed by enemy fighters, they have to fight back with what they have, and some of the drop troops use their repulsor-driven Jet Packs as propulsion.
• The radio operator from Tales of Pirx the Pilot has a habit of just tossing whatever junk he happens to have in his pockets when he needs reaction mass in microgravity, without regard for other crewmembers' safety. This does not make him popular. Pirx also muses that in microgravity you could commit a perfect murder by simply waiting for your victim to leave the shower with nothing on him and pushing him into a place he won't be able to push himself off.

Live-Action TV

• In the pilot for Come Back Mrs. Noah, Mrs. Noah finds herself adrift in zero gravity and is told that releasing gas will get her moving, which she does by spritzing her perfume sprayer.
• In the Doctor Who serial "Four to Doomsday", the Fifth Doctor threw a cricket ball in order to move himself away from one ship and toward his TARDIS. He even managed to catch the ball after it bounced off the other ship for a further speed boost.
• John Crichton maneuvered himself with a pulse rifle on Farscape.
• Mission: Impossible: In "Target Earth", Shannon is set adrift in space. She uses the purge valve on her spacesuit to bleed air out of her air tanks and propel her back to the shuttle.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect" the Enterprise is stuck in a time loop, with no engines, on a collision course with another ship. One of the suggestions each time is to vent the shuttle bay to push the ship out of the way. This is the suggestion that ends up working when they finally try it.
• An earthbound example in My Secret Identity: The young superhero could float in midair, but not fly. He propelled himself with two ordinary aerosol cans.

Radio

• In The BBC's 1980 sci-fi drama Earthsearch, the crew leave their starship in a shuttle to explore the derelict Challenger II. On returning they discover that Fagor has taken control of their own Challenger and is flying it away. It turns out they have enough fuel to catch up, but only after their air has run out. As if that wasn't bad enough, Fagor then sets out from their ship under its own power to finish them off anyway. Fortunately this provides the answer to both their problems - the crew discover that Fagor's master had upgraded the shuttle with plasma cannons, and once they've destroyed the robot they realise they can turn the shuttle around and accelerate backwards using the plasma cannons' recoil.

Tabletop Games

• In Selfish, each player is an astronaut stranded in space after a catastrophic crash, and only the first one to evade the floating wreckage and get back to the escape pod can survive. You have to decide whether to save your limited oxygen supply to keep yourself alive, or vent some of it to get a crucial speed boost past your erstwhile shipmates.

Video Games

• Broken Age: Shay fashions a makeshift propulsion system from a whipped cream gun.
• In The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, the only way to reach the Amarax Station from your jump point is to use an aerosol can of Cheese Girl to propel yourself toward the station.
• Kerbal Space Program: If your ship is out of fuel, it's possible to get out of the craft and push with the EVA jetpack. Since jetpack fuel is automatically refilled when you get back in the cockpit, it's theoretically possible to get anywhere in the system a few m/s at a time.
  • Scott Manley did an even more awesome version that involved an inverted rocket as well as an kerbonaut trapped on the Mun.
• In NetHack, you can propel yourself backward while floating by throwing an item.
• In Rodina, you can use fire extinguishers to maneuver in freefall in case your Jet Pack isn't enough.

Webcomics

• Freefall:
  • Sam had difficulty maneuvering when he first went into space, but he came up with two solutions involving duct tape. First, Florence gave him a stick for pushing off of surfaces, with duct tape wrapped arpund the ends to cushion any impact and prevent damage to the ship. Later, when he was caught without his stick, he resorted to wrapping duct tape around his hands with the sticky side facing out in order to climb along walls.
  • His robot Helix turned off the electromagnets in his feet and used his coolant fan for thrust. (This left very few options for steering or braking.)

Western Animation

• In one episode of Black Dynamite, after America's Most Loved Black Man, O.J. Simpson, tricked him into going into space, his rocket exploded and he had to get himself to an abandoned Soviet space station, so he fired his big-ass revolver in the opposite direction.
• Dogstar: In "Twice the Excitement", Simone is trapped outside and drifting away from the Valiant. Gemma throws a rock that opens the valve on Simone's oxygen tank, propelling her back to the ship.
• In Love, Death & Robots episode "Helping Hand", an astronaut is adrift in space, so she removes her glove and throws it in the opposite direction to propel herself back towards her spaceship. Her hand freezes up in less than a minute, so when she misses her chance to grab the spaceship she breaks off the frozen arm and throws it away as well.
• One episode of Rescue Heroes had one of the characters vent the air from his spacesuit's backup oxygen tank.

Real Life

• A famous orbital mechanics problem about this goes: if you're stranded 50 feet behind the space shuttle with only a wrench to maneuver with, how can you get back to the shuttle? If you were in deep space, the correct answer would of course be to throw the wrench away from the shuttle, causing you to drift slowly toward it. The space shuttle is in near-Earth orbit, however, and it turns out that this means the correct answer is to throw the wrench toward the shuttle; this will drop you into a lower (and thus faster) orbit than the one the shuttle is in, allowing you to catch up with it.

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