Sandbox / Batman Can Breathe in Space

Example sorting

Do not delete any examples from this section.

Instances where a character has advanced technology or superpowers, but it's not clear if they justify the character surviving in space, are marked as Unsure - powers.

ZCEs and generally confusing examples are marked Unsure.

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Examples:

Advertising

• OK Herman Li and Sam Totman of DragonForce on an asteroid in this ad for Capital One. Presumably, they are protected by The Power of Rock.
• OK A PBS promotion for Sesame Street briefly has Big Bird and a five-year-old girl on the Moon during the Apollo landings with no protection whatsoever.

Anime and Manga

• Wrong - powers In AKIRA, Tetsuo flies into space to blow up an orbital space laser. He's shown projecting an energy field around his body, presumably to protect against the vacuum of space. He also seemingly has no trouble breathing without an air supply.
  • The whole story is his journey to transcend the realm of normal physics, though, so it is not out of character for the story at that point.
• Wrong - powers In A Certain Magical Index: Miracle of Endymion, Kaori Kanzaki does not need a space suit while everybody else does. She is a Saint and therefore much tougher than an ordinary human. She was also surrounded by a magical energy field.
• OK In A Certain Scientific Railgun, Mikoto and Kuroko are launched to the edge of the atmosphere to deal with an approaching missile. They are not bothered by the vacuum, but could not breathe and had to work fast so Kuroko could teleport them back to Earth before they suffocated.
• OK Digimon Frontier: Late on the series, our heroes end stranded in a moon, and there's no air problems. A Fan Sub actually lampshaded this. Then again, they're in the digital world. Everything is made of data, so real-world physics don't apply.
• OK Doraemon: Doraemon has pocket gadgets that allows one to breathe in space without a suit.
• Unsure - powers In Dragon Ball, Son Goku uses his power pole to drop the rabbit-like Carrot Master and his thugs off on the moon. Neither Goku making the trip or the moon bound gang members suffer any ill effects likely due to anime physics.
  • OK Vegeta and Nappa are shown to be able to breathe in space, even though Frieza later claims that Saiyans cannot. This was in a brief filler episode where both Saiyan warriors are standing just outside their spaceships. Being in close proximity to their vessel's artificial atmosphere could possibly explain this.
  • Wrong - powers Frieza's own species is strong enough to survive vacuum pressures and radiation, so they can float through space all they like.
  • remove Frieza's species may have evolved with the ability to use anaerobic respiration. Resisting vacuum pressures and radiation is a result of being strong enough to resist them from training or exposure to it. Either that or energy manipulation to create an environment for resistance.
    • Cell, having Frieza's cells (Yeah...) can probably do the same thing, and does so in filler. The various forms of Majin Buu also have no problems moving around in space, nor does Baby from GT. Seems to be a trend across Dragon Ball villains.
  • Unsure - powers Also, during the fight between Bardock and Frieza, Bardock is just floating in space kicking butt (or is at least in the outer atmosphere). Despite Frieza's claim, it seems Saiyans can breathe in space, or they can channel enough energy around them to create a shield of such to trap oxygen in however temporarily.
    • Plus, Bardock was only in the upper atmosphere for less than ten minutes.
  • Unsure - powers In Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, Beerus and Goku have a conversation and part of their fight in low Earth orbit. Beerus is a legitimate Physical God, but Goku's just this guy. Several comments that Beerus makes suggest that Goku may have permanently ascended to "god" status... or at the very least, he has kept some of the upgrades offered by the Super Saiyan God form, even though that's not supposed to happen.
• OK Galaxy Express 999: Tetsuro is baffled to hear the sound of distant church bells as the 999 approaches a planet. Its inhabitants are so arrogantly pious that they have gravitational wave emitters which broadcast an intense graviton carrier wave which induces the sound of distant church bells in passing ships. Impressed, Tetsuro rolls down the window and sticks his head out to get a better look.
• Unsure - Are mamoru and kaidou "normal"? GaoGaiGar: Guy Shishioh has survived in space without a space suit, but he was a cyborg at the time, later on, when he becomes an evoluder, he no longer needs anything to survive in space. Mamoru and Kaidou both can fly and survive for long periods in space un-aided, even while unconscious!
• Wrong - powers Nami from The Girl Who Leapt Through Space can breathe and move through space fine when her Superpowered Evil Side is around.
• OK Glass Fleet: unless it's relevant to the plot that they don't, it's safe to assume that humans can breathe in space. There's only one time where it's relevant.
• Wrong - powers The highly evolved Silver Tribe in Heroic Age have this ability, as do the Nodos. Then again, the former can create matter out of nothing and the latter are giant superpowered space monsters in human form.
• OK On the last episode of the Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel anime, the girls fly off to space via pure willpower to destroy a Kill Sat. They're also shown surviving re-entry into the atmosphere fine. Oddly, despite all her complaints of "How do we go to space?" and "How do we come back from space?", Kurumi never asks how are they breathing in space.
• Wrong - powers Kiddy Grade and Kiddy GiRL-AND have multiple examples of characters breathing in space, handwaved by the ubiquitous nanomist technology.
• Wrong - powers The final battle of Kill la Kill takes place in space. Neither of the fighters is technically human, as they are rather hybrids of human and Life Fiber, the resident alien menace, so them easily surviving the vacuum of space could be justified. Being able to talk, less so; but this being a Trigger show that basically runs on Rule of Cool it's probably better not to think too hard about it.
• Wrong - powers Kotetsu Jeeg: Shiba Hiroshi, justified because he is a cyborg. It's pointed out in the sequel Kotetsushin Jeeg, when he opens the hatch on his cockpit when they're on the moon and steps out.
  Kenji: Hey wait, there's no air out there!
  Hiroshi: I don't need it.
• Unsure In Kurau Phantom Memory, Christmas and Kurau pull this off when their space ship gets blown up.
• Macross:
  • Unsure That scarf Hikaru/Rick used early on in Super Dimension Fortress Macross/Robotech must have been some kind of awesome to have let him survive out there in space. Unless... this trope.
    • Possibly with a side order of Science Marches On and Artistic License, as the episode establishes that Hikaru was holding his breath while out in hard vacuum, which as mentioned above is not a good idea if you're exposed to it... Seriously, the greater issue was he was in an unpressurized, and not thermally insulated, flight jumpsuit. And how did the tuna not get freezer burn, anyway?
  • Wrong - powers The Zentraedi cannot actually breathe in space, but they're designed to have a greatly increased resistance to vacuum. Breetai gets Thrown Out the Airlock at one point, but then spends a minute or two crawling around outside the ship and jumps back in with no ill effects. In Macross Frontier, Ranka gets exposed to vacuum briefly, and is unhurt, which she chalks up to her quarter-Zentran ancestry.
  • Wrong - powers The Protodeviln from Macross 7 are all able to survive in vacuum with no protection, being genetically engineered superweapons for space combat. They also display the ability to protect others from the effects of vacuum by shielding them in some sort of energy field.
• Wrong - powers The final battle of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation takes place in low Earth orbit, and Nanoha is not only able to breath but is able to talk to her opponent. Presumably, her Barrier Jacket handles all those pesky issues like a lack of breathable atmosphere and harmful radiation.
• Wrong - powers, suits Everyone in the Tenchi Muyo! OVAs appears to be able to breathe in space. This is probably the least strange thing about space in that series, so it doesn't stand out too much. The characters in the lower power-tier require spacesuits, but since they use hyper advanced technology, they don't look much to the part — invisible forcefields instead of helmets, and so on. Ayeka, Tenchi and Mihoshi all wear such suits early in the anime, but later Tenchi stops using his, due to realizing the power of the Light Hawk Wings. Usually handwaved by the fact that those who have any significant importance in Kajishima's canon are explicitly said to be Physical Gods and thus technically don't need to breathe.
  • Strangely, in the Tenchi in Tokyo timeline, Ryoko can still levitate, conjure fireballs, pass through walls, and perform short-range teleportation, but she can't breathe in space like in the OVA and Universe timelines.
• OK My-Otome. Some fans have tried to justify it by saying "Otome can breathe in space," but nanomachine enhancements would not change the fact that "Otome needs oxygen badly!" In the OVA Arika even takes the completely-normal Mashiro with her (for a sight-seeing tour of the world... no seriously, that's exactly what she says).
  • It's entirely possible that said sequences only take place in the outer atmosphere where some oxygen would still be present, although that still doesn't help the Mashiro example. Then there's the fact that Lena gets slammed into the side of the moon in Sifr...
• Wrong - powers Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Tohru has demonstrated the ability to go into orbit (or at least the upper atmosphere) without any form of space suit. It's unclear if she was using magic to protect herself.
• Unsure In Naruto The Last, Naruto's fight against Toneri on the moon definitely qualifies.
• OK Kaworu in Rebuild of Evangelion doesn't need a spacesuit in space.
• Unsure In NG Knight Lamune & 40, the Doki-Doki Space seems to have air, which is because everyone can breathe and talk freely.
• Wrong - powers The heroes from Night Wizard can move around in the moon with no problem whatsoever, and with no need of air either. Because they're wizards.
• Wrong - powers Eneru from One Piece flew to the moon following his defeat and had no trouble walking around in just awesome pants. He is living lightning after all. That, and the One Piece 'verse has only the vaguest resemblance to Real Life physics.
• Wrong - powers One-Punch Man: Saitama was once punched to the Moon, and had no problem relaxing there briefly before jumping right back.
• Wrong - powers Near the end of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Homura gets stuck on the moon for a few minutes, and has no difficulty breathing or talking. There's no explicit explanation of how she can breathe or even how she got there, though it presumably has something to do with Madoka paradoxically destroying her own witch and rewriting the universe.
• Wrong - powers Not only can Sailor Moon breathe in space, she can even survive re-entry or rather, she and the rest of the team together can power the Silver Imperium Crystal enough to generate a heat and braking shield that just barely manages the job. Then again, she is a Magical Girl. In the manga they can just jump into orbit, breathe in space, and survive re-entry with ease.
• Unsure - powers The titular Symphogear users from Symphogear not only breathe in space but they also have no problem talking or singing there. Handwaved as a telepathy from the gears' powers.
• OK A number of characters in Sgt. Frog get away with this. Lampshaded in the Funimation dub, when the narrator complains about Space Police Officer Poyon walking around unprotected in space at the start of episode 11.
• OK Sonic X:
  • Early in the first season Sonic wing-walks the Blue Tornado into space, and promptly freezes when outside of Earth's atmosphere. He is fine when they re-enter it. Their own universe must have different laws, or something...
  • The third season. All the furries and alien beings can breathe, speak, and generally not die while strolling or freefalling in space without wearing anything other than their fur or clothes, but human characters (Chris and Eggman) have to wear space suits when space walking.
• OK In Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato, our heroes can turn their regular uniform into a spacesuit just by putting on a helmet. This often leaves their neck or the back of their driving-glove-clad hands open to space, which realistically would produce massive bruising at best.
  • In Space Battleship Yamato: The New Journey, Desslok is shown standing on his ship without even a helmet. Also, his cape is billowing in the space-wind.
  • Really, that's par for the course for any Matsumoto production. The windows on the Galaxy Express 999 open, Harlock is often seen steering the Arcadia from his battle bridge — on top of his ship (next to the fluttering Skull and Crossbones flag) and Big One from Galaxy Railways has a balcony at the rear where you can stand and watch while your hair blows in the space-breeze.
    • Some of that is justified with advanced technology being used to achieve said aesthetics: the 999 is explicitly enveloped in a forcefield and Harlock has asked at least once about the status of the flag-fluttering mechanism of his ship, for example, and the time the passengers of the 999 heard church bells in space Tetsuro wondered how it was even happening and was told that the people of a nearby planet were so proud of their bells they were broadcasting their sound (that's when Tetsuro opened the window so he could hear it better). Some, however, remains unexplained and works purely on Rule of Cool.
• Wrong - has atmosphere In Tamagotchi, a human girl named Tomomi is at one point teleported to Tamagotchi Planet by accident and has no problems breathing in the planet's atmosphere. This isn't the only time in the franchise it's happened, either - in Tamagotchi: The Movie, another human girl named Tanpopo is accidentally transported to Tamagotchi Planet and doesn't have any trouble breathing there either.
• OK Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, but by the time we see people breathing in space, there are things so much crazier that it's easy to overlook.
• Wrong - powers Toward the Terra: Jomy and Soldier Blue can both breathe in space (and the initially-thin atmosphere of Naska), although this is attributed to their hyper-advanced Psychic Powers. Other Mu don't seem to have this ability.
• Wrong - powers In UQ Holder!:
  • We see several characters get put in vacuum and not die from it, including former protagonist Negi Springfield. Of course, all the characters in question are explicitly immortal, so being unable to breathe isn't exactly a showstopper for them.
  • A flashback shows a battle in the Asteroid Belt against Cosmo Entelechea, and while most of the ordinary people are wearing spacesuits, the high-level (not immortal) mages are not, suggesting there is some kind of magic that can be applied to breathe in space.
• Wrong - powers Yes! Pretty Cure 5: The Pretty Cure 5 were able to fight on the moon without any problems. Presumably they consulted Sailor Moon on proper breathing-in-space technique.
  • And then they gave those techniques to the HeartCatch Pretty Cure! girls, who also move around space fine during the Final Battle.
  • In Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure, it is stated that their pendants have magical properties even when they are not transformed, it allows the four girls to breathe in the vacuum of space and in any atmosphere, it also allows them to understand any language.

Asian Animation

• OK 3000 Whys of Blue Cat: When Blue Cat and Feifei get sent into outer space in the episode "Will Earth Be Destroyed?", they're able to talk to each other just fine without wearing helmets or space clothes.

Comic Books

• Wrong - not real space Batman does this in one of the early issues of Justice League International (granted, it was due to the New Genesis-created training satellite's programming directive to not actually harm its opponents, thus causing it to create an artificial atmosphere when Bats's space helmet gets broken, but all the same). One issue of Justice League of America showed Batman training himself, not to be able to breathe in space, but to at least survive the vacuum of space for a couple of seconds. The Martian Manhunter helps while wondering if he should.
• Wrong - powers During the Trial By Fire storyline of JLA, Firestorm finds himself out on the moon, breathing normally. Then, he is attacked and transformed back into Ronnie Raymond. He is immediately unable to breathe or function, and it is only Flash's assistance that saves him.
• Wrong - powers Superman, in the Silver Age version.
  • However, even Superman is seen using a breathing apparatus in space in early Post-Crisis comics, though he has since kicked his oxygen addiction as part of his general muscling up to near Silver Age levels.
  • Nowadays, that just means that he can hold his breath for absurd lengths of time (as can several of his spaceworthy allies, like Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman). He's still working this trope, though, when he talks in space, which he's done in a couple recent issues of JLA.
  • In the video game Justice League Heroes, Martian Manhunter reminds Superman to hold his breath in the intro to a series of levels that take place on Mars. A few levels later, Superman and Wonder Woman are fighting in the vacuum of space and talking, screaming, and fairly obviously breathing. Inconsistency much?
  • In some instances Superman has ridiculous lung capacity (due to his amazing strength being able to compress air in his lungs like an oxygen bottle). So a lot of the time Superman is simply holding his breath... then again, some of the time he's not.
  • And at one point he didn't even need to breathe altogether: during Jeph Loeb's run on Superman during the time when Brainiac 13 upgraded Metropolis. Superman was suffering from Kryptonite Poisoning induced by a nanobot, and Steel, Superboy, and Supergirl were shrunk down to go into Superman and cure him. While there, Superboy and Steel got blown into Big Blue's stomach, which was "the intestinal equivalent of a nuclear reactor! This is the man's power source... his body's splitting atoms to convert them into pure energy"! The person talking was The Prankster in Steel's hijacked armor, so his scientific knowledge of the situation may not be accurate, and this was a few origin re-tellings ago....
  • In War World both Kryptonian cousins sail the galaxy at their heart's content. Neither Clark nor Linda need to breathe due to her Kryptonian physiology. They can talk each other, though, thanks to their Super Ventriloquism (whatever it is). Martian Manhunter does not need to breathe either, and The Spectre is... well, a spirit.
  • In Supergirl Volume 2 #21 both Kryptonian cousins and Kryptonite Man fight in space. Neither of them needs to breathe.
  • As of the New 52, Kryptonians do not have to breathe, as long as their bodies have enough stored sunlight. Supergirl discovers this when she gets surprised and gasps while swimming in Supergirl vol. 6 #12.
    Supergirl: And somehow... Impossibly... I don't have to breathe. Just like I don't need to eat anymore. I don't need to sleep anymore. I should be used to impossible by now.
  • Red Daughter of Krypton Supergirl storyline provided several examples: Supergirl and Superman didn't need to breathe because they are sun-powered Kryptonians; Green and Red Lantern can survive in space because their rings' force field provides a self-recycling oxygen bubble; the Diasporan alien race can survive in the vacuum of space (that capability works against them when Supergirl notes that she can blow their ships up without killing them).
  • In Justice, Superman and Captain Marvel can survive in space without breathing — however, only Cap can talk, because he does it magically. Superman can't.
  • The main reason animals breathe is to get energy. Since Superman gets most of his energy from sunlight, it's plausible that he wouldn't need air. That being said, plants also need air to get energy, though they process it very differently, and there are entirely different reasons air might be helpful. For example, to stay cool.
• Wrong - powers Wonder Woman (1942): Speaking of Wonder Woman, her Silver Age version had earrings to provide life support in space by creating a "transparent envelope" (apparently "bubble" was too undescriptive). Since she was also sculpted from clay and brought to life through magic it is entirely possible she does in fact not need oxygen to survive.
• Wrong - powers In X-Men: What If Stryfe Killed Apocalypse, (somewhat before Fatal Attractions, set during the events of X-Cutioner's Song) it is demonstrated that vacuum is one of the things which will, in fact, kill Wolverine. If that were to happen today, he'd barely blink an eye...
  • OK Speaking of X-Cutioner's Song, there's one scene where Cyclops and Jean Grey escape one of Stryfe's fortresses and attempt to get away by crawling across the moon. Not only do they survive that brief point of time before they pass out. That's also counting the fact that there's also probably enough gravity that Jean can take a misstep and promptly faceplant onto the moon's surface and get a bloody nose.
• Wrong - powers Apollo of The Authority works this way. At one point he is asked how he operates in space, and responds that he just doesn't breathe. "Just like that?" "Well, I'd look pretty stupid if I tried to breathe in space, wouldn't I?" That's all the (non-)explanation we get.
  • And yet he can talk in space, albeit thanks to Electronic Telepathy courtesy of the Engineer.
  • Jenny Quantum doesn't need to breathe either — apparently, taking little jaunts into space to "chase the sun" is a typical father/daughter thing for ridonkulously powerful superheroes. Since she's an Energy Being in human form, it might make sense. Or not.
  • Apollo, due to the way his powers work, is directly nourished by solar energy and solar energy alone. He doesn't need to eat or breathe. He probably doesn't need to sleep either, but that doesn't stop him from sharing a bed with Midnighter.
    • For that matter, Midnighter once mentioned that he and Apollo can survive in anaerobic environments, albeit briefly. That's right; the Bat-expy can breathe in space.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • Wrong - fancy suit The Legionnaires wear "transuits", essentially skin-tight, invisible space suits that somehow provide all the protection they need. So, it just looks like they're all breathing in space. In the cartoon series, it was explained away as one of the properties of the flight rings.
  • Wrong - powers Justified in The Great Darkness Saga when a Servant of Darkness destroys a Legion Cruiser going on an interplanetary trip. White Witch casts a force protective shield spell around her and her Legion teammates to keep the oxygen and warmth in and the cold and radiation out as waiting for a rescue team.
• Wrong - powers In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan doesn't need to breathe, and momentarily forgets that ordinary humans do, he then provides Silk Spectre with a Legion style invisible forcefield. Mars is only slightly more human friendly than space.
• Wrong - powers In Invincible, any Viltrumite (plus Allen the alien) can survive in space so long as they hold their breath. Which apparently is a very long time. Long enough to cross interstellar distances without a spaceship.
• Wrong - powers In an issue of Marvel Star Wars Vader survives an assassination attempt via opening airlock, since he has a life-support suit; the officers who attempted the assault get sucked out instead.
• Unsure The Fantastic Four just use helmets— their uniforms double as spacesuits (except The Thing, his skin is tougher than any spacesuit) — the Space Activity Suit was still several years away from invention when the FF started this practice.
• Wrong - powers In PS238, they take a class excursion to the moon. The various superkids require various levels of protection, and Captain Clarinet (the son of a Superman Captain Ersatz) has some trouble explaining that he DOES, in fact, need to breathe, and thus goes up wearing a breathing-apparatus. (He still has no trouble with the radiation, temperature, or general vacuum-ness, though.) Then Emerald Gauntlet Jr. reveals that his Gauntlet can both provide a protective force-field AND gather oxygen-atoms from the surroundings to allow him to breathe. "I'm cool that way", as he puts it. Then he winds up marooned on the moon along with a few other students, including the Evil Genius Zodon, and suggests that he could just ferry them all back to Earth with his Gauntlet... only for Zodon to explain that, while he can probably gather enough oxygen to maintain breathing on the moon (the moon's consists of approximately 40% oxygen, though most of it is bound to silicon), the same cannot be said for interplanetary space.
• Wrong - powers Empowered discovers this by accident when she steps on to an airless asteroid from a malfunctioning portal. Then again, her supersuit didn't come with instructions.
• OK If you're a comic book character simply ignoring physics is a valid option: in Trinity, Despero leaps out of his armada flagship to fight Green Lantern in space, when his lackey objects saying he has no space suit on, Despero merely shouts "Air is for cowards! Do it!" and he actually survives perfectly fine.
• OK In the Sam & Max: Freelance Police episode, "Bad Day On The Moon", the eponymous duo blast off to the moon (via thousands and thousands of match heads stuffed into the DeSoto's tailpipe) with only a set of penny-conscious moon gear (paper bags with plastic eye holes to put over their heads) to protect them from the lack of atmosphere on the moon. But, despite Sam's preparedness (he brought a spare bag in case he ran out of air), it turns out that they can breathe easily on the moon, as Max exemplifies by taking his bag off to dig some moon dust out of his eye. Explained thusly:
  Sam: So let me get this straight: We can breathe on the moon?
  Max: I guess those candy-butt astronauts never had the stones to try!
• Wrong - powers The Post-Crisis Captain Atom originally couldn't breathe in space, and once, when an enemy teleported him to the outer solar system, he had to fly back to Earth while holding his breath, which he could only do for a normal amount of time. Later on, though, he learned to use his powers to create and manipulate matter to keep his lungs filled with air indefinitely, so he could stay in space as long as he wanted.
• Wrong - powers In Infinite Crisis, Superboy Prime jaw jacks with the entire Green Lantern Corps. In space. The Corps. are protected by their rings of course. When Earth 1 & 2 Supermen tackle Superboy Prime, they hold their breath while Prime keeps insulting them and throwing punches casually, until they throw him through the red sun of Krypton and fly him right into Mogo, a Planet that just happens to be a Green Lantern. Comics are weird.
• Wrong - powers Lobo can breathe, talk and smoke a cigar in space. Of course, Lobo lives and breathes Beyond the Impossible.
• Wrong - powers The Incredible Hulk can breathe and survive in the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - powers The Mighty Thor plays this fast and loose. It's not specifically stated that he doesn't need to breathe, but he is shown surviving in space for short periods. The writers probably thought "He's a god, so why not? It's long since been confirmed that Thor can survive perfectly fine in space, considering he went round for round with the Phoenix Force (the entity itself, not the host) in deep space wearing nothing but his normal sparkly pants.
  • This didn't apply to Eric Masterson when he was masquerading as Thor. During The Infinity Gauntlet, Doctor Strange invokes a spell that gave everyone an hour of air. However, during combat, Eric is knocked away from his hammer and returns just short of it before he returns to being Eric and nearly suffocates before he can be restored.
  • This seems not to be a universal divine or Asgardian trait; it only applies to Loki - or at least his third incarnation - if he's actively using magic to "handle the small matter of us not explosively decompressing," per Young Avengers. His "Kid Loki" incarnation just wore a spacesuit.
• OK In Cerebus the Aardvark, during Cerebus' time on the Moon with the Judge at the end of Church and State II and the extensive "trek through the solar system" section in the last quarter of Minds, Cerebus and other characters have no space-faring gear of any sort.
• Wrong - unremarkable aversion In The Superman Adventures, an aversion becomes a plot point. Superman deals with Krypto, gone berserk because he can't handle the stimulation, by briefly spacing him, knocking him unconscious.
• OK In the second story-arc of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW) the lack of oxygen doesn't seem to be an issue on the moon. The princesses did bring the moon closer first, so it could just be within the planet's atmosphere, but that wasn't the reason they gave for doing it.
• Wrong - powers Shakara: Downplayed. The Shakara were so resilient that they could withstand the vacuum of space for long stretches of time (whereas most other species will promptly explode), but apparently not indefinitely.
• Wrong - powers In Superman: American Alien, a young and inexperienced Superman attempts to fly to the moon. He learns the hard way that while his invulnerability lets him survive a vacuum, he still needs to breathe. He almost dies before he manages to fly back to Earth.
• Wrong - powers Ultimate Vision: Vision and Dima are both artificial beings, so of course they can survive the vacuum of space and simply leave the doomed satellite.

Comic Strips

• OK Calvin and Hobbes:
  • Calvin's Spaceman Spiff persona is once seen repairing his spaceship without adequate vacuum protection. This is Artistic License on the part of the character rather than the author.
  • Calvin himself breathes in space just fine, such as in the strips where he sneezes himself into orbit, grows too large to stand on the Earth, or flies to Mars with Hobbes on his wagon. Of course, considering it might all just be Calvin's imagination, it makes sense he wouldn't let himself asphyxiate in his own fantasy.

Fan Works

• Wrong - powers In Power Girl fanfic A Force of Four Kryptonians and Hatorians don’t need to breathe. It becomes a plot point when the four villains have to relocate their Earthborn prisoners but can't move them to a place with no atmosphere.
  The atmosphere was not like that of Earth or Krypton. It was mainly carbon dioxide, at a pressure of about .15 psi, as opposed to 14.7 psi on Terra and a slightly greater density on their homeworld. Their voices sounded strange to themselves when they spoke. But the air's differing composition meant nothing to them. They could breathe almost anything, or nothing at all.
• Unsure Everyone in The End of Ends can breathe in space.
• Wrong - powers In Supergirl fanfic Hellsister Trilogy, the Legionnaires can breathe in space thanks to their Flight Rings -and some of them like Supergirl because of their natural powers- but they still need additional devices to communicate with each other. Supergirl's ability to exist out of the boundaries of a planet comes up when she arrives in the 31st century.
  When she had slowed enough, Supergirl simply winked out of warp-time and found herself back in orbital space. Her lungs automatically tried to breathe, found vacuum, and ceased action. Kara willed them subconsciously to retain what oxygen they contained.
• Wrong - powers Last Child of Krypton: In this crossover Shinji thinks maybe he can breathe in space… sometimes he jokes about it… and later he confirms he can, indeed. Because he is Superman.
  Shinji: Hi, I'm Shinji Ikari, and I can breathe in space?
• Wrong - powers The same goes for another Kryptonian character in The Last Daughter, where Taylor Hebert becomes Superwoman.
• Wrong - powers In Bringer of Death both Cooler (Frieza's brother, and as such has this ability) and Cell try and take advantage of this against Vegeta, only to learn that Vegeta expected this and had put together a method to store oxygen in his lungs, with his Super Saiyan aura taking care of the other problems.
• Wrong - powers Invoked in Supergirl (2015) story Survivors. Before getting out of her rocket Kara is worried about the alien atmosphere being breathable. She dares take a breath and confirms she can breathe in that atmosphere.
• Wrong - powers In Superman story Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation Superman's Home Base is located within the asteroid Ceres. Superman can reach it because he doesn't need to breathe. He doesn't like the reminder, though, because it makes him feel less human.
  He had little taste for space, actually. The lack of sound was a major sensory deprivation. He could always attune his super-hearing to take in noises from Earth or other planets, and often he did. But it never kept back the knowledge that the spaces between worlds were not intended for human life, not even such as his.
  Krypts could survive there. Because Krypts were freaks.
• Wrong - powers In Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Supergirl fanfic The Vampire of Steel, Supergirl flies out of the atmosphere to get rid of an Eldritch Abomination. Being Kryptonian, the space vacuum is not trouble at all.
• Wrong - powers Sonic the Hedgehog's canon ability to breathe in space is justified in Descent into Darkness as being a trait of dokan. They absorb, and use, oxygen more efficiently than humans.
• OK Partway through Dahlia Hawthorne Escaps From Pirson, we see Britain fly off into space as a result of Brexit. At no point does anyone in Britain, regardless of if they were already there or had just arrived to find out what’s going on, seem to have trouble with breathing or gravity or the like.
• Wrong - powers Child of the Storm has Asgardians and Kryptonians, who have no trouble surviving in space. As Harry's Asgardian heritage comes through, he is seen more than once hanging out in the upper atmosphere or space without any protective gear - though part of that might be his use of telekinesis.
• OK Sunday Skivvies, a fanfiction of The Loud House, has Luan ask why the comic book character Muscle Fish can breathe in space.
• Wrong - powers In Here There Be Monsters, the various entities empowering the Marvel family or villains like Ibac and Sabbac grant their chosen ones the ability to survive with no atmosphere.
  Ibac was somewhat reassured when he found that the vacuum and cold of space could be resisted by calling on his powers, plus the shield that Sabbac had given him.
• OK In Snic nd the OSrailian resrant, Saniic jumps into space, touches the moon softly, and comes back down.
• Unsure - powers Discussed in Man of Steel story Daughter of Fire and Steel. When the Black Zero crew arrives in Earth, they test the planet's atmosphere before going out of their ship to ascertain whether its air is safe to breathe.

Film — Animation

• OK In Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, all of the kids are seen sitting in open space multiple times without any equipment whatsoever. Also there's the fact that a fire can be built on a large asteroid and an airless area is apparently capable of conveying sound.
• OK In the Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf film Moon Castle: The Space Adventure, the gang goes to the moon to keep the Gourd King from making it bitter. They do not wear their spacesuits while on the moon, and yet they have no problems breathing there.
• OK In The Return of Hanuman, Hanuman fought against Rahu and Ketu in outer space, with no space equipment whatsoever.
• Unsure This happens to Batman himself in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. After the destruction of the Kryptonite meteor, Batman is trapped in what can only be described as a small airplane for several minutes in space, while Superman beats up the President. Finally, Superman gets around to rescuing his best friend, who is unconscious, but still alive.
• OK In Treasure Planet, everyone can breathe in space. No explanation; they just... can. Chalk it up to Rule of Cool, since the whole movie treats space like an ocean. Space is called "The Etherium". And there's all sorts of spaceborne organisms, like Space Whales.

Film — Live-Action

• Wrong - powers The Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise are capable of surviving in the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - fancy suit Inelegantly averted in 12 to the Moon where NASA apparently coughed up the extra cash to replace the astronaut's faceplates with "invisible force-screens" that they make a point to mention before the crew steps out (read: They didn't want to fuss with trying to work camera lighting around proper helmets). Two of the astronauts notice the rubber gasket on their Everything Sensor moving.
  Astronaut: There must be air. [test this theory by taking off their helmets]
  MST3K: Good thing it's good air!
• OK In Airplane II: The Sequel, after the Mayflower crash lands on the Moon, the passengers evacuate onto the surface without any breathing gear. Also, they can hear each other fine and there's apparently normal Earth gravity.
• OK Comically treated as the Elephant in the Living Room in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, when Mini-Me's rescued unharmed some time long after he was sent spinning off into space.
  Dr. Evil: It's a flu shot. You've been in the coldness of space, I don't want you to get sick.
• OK Near the end of The Black Hole the characters are inexplicably seen climbing from the Cygnus to the probe ship through the vacuum of space without space suits.
• Wrong - powers Gamera can breathe in space as well... he can fly too...
  • This essay describes the biology of Kaiju, such as how they can move, fly and Breathe In Space.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • OK Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) apparently operates by the principle that you can't breathe in space, but if you have some kind of respirator, you need no other protection from the elements. Peter Quill flies from the Kyln to the other Guardians in the Milano in nothing but his civilian clothes and his mask, which doesn't even cover his hair. Similarly, Peter later saves Gamora's life by coming out of his mining pod in space and giving her his mask, holding his breath long enough for The Cavalry — in the form of his space pirate adopted family — to come and get both of them. Neither suffer particularly ill effects given that they both spend about a minute in vacuum.
  • Wrong - powers Avengers: Infinity War: The Guardians are shocked to discover Thor floating in space, alive after having spent who knows how long in the vacuum without any protection. He's near death, but only due to injuries he received before being spaced. Later in the movie, he deliberately goes out without a space suit, and is none the worse for wear. He can even speak and pant in space, somehow.
  • Wrong - powers In Captain Marvel, this is one of Carol's many powers.
• OK Parodied in Spaceballs, when Barf moves Princess Vespa to Lone Starr's ship, he just takes a ladder and climbs in her sun roof.
• Wrong - powers In Star Trek: First Contact, Borg drones stroll across the hull of the Enterprise without environmental suits. Presumably, their internal replicators (mentioned in series episode "I, Borg") supply them with whatever gases they need. Perhaps whatever turns their skin gray also maintains their internal pressure.
  • Given that the Borg don't need to eat it's entirely possible that they don't need to breathe. It's also possible forcefield trickery is at play, or those drones seen working on the Enterprise hull have been specifically modified to function in a vacuum.
• Star Wars:
  • OK In The Empire Strikes Back, while they use breathing masks at the time, when Han, Leia, and Chewie venture outside the Millennium Falcon while hiding in what turns out to be a giant space slug, they don't seem to have any protection against decompression. One could assume the asteroid was large enough to have enough of some semblance of an atmosphere, or that the worm's innards are responsible.
  • Wrong - aversion In The Last Jedi, a rebel ship gets blasted and Leia is sucked out into space. She is able to use the Force to pull herself back to an airlock. Downplayed as she then goes into a coma and needs life support for a while before recovering.
• Superman:
  • Wrong - powers During Superman II, Zod, Ursa and Non (well, him, not so much) had a lengthy conversation with each other about taking over the world whilst on the moon. As well as talking to an astronaut. Even if they could talk in space, he shouldn't be able to hear them through his air-tight helmet.
  • OK Abused in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace:
    • Superman talks in space. Nuclear Man uses his super-breath in space. To freeze Superman. Lacy screams in space. And by that point, the brain melts, if it hadn't already from everything else wrong with that film.
    • And in a deleted scene, he takes the boy who wrote to him saying he should destroy all of Earth's nuclear weapons for a flight around the Earth, without a spacesuit. At least in the comic book adaptation he gives him one.
    • Hilariously, at the end of the film, after defeating Nuclear-Man and Luthor asks him how he did it, Superman begins his answer with the words "High school physics..."
  • Wrong In Man of Steel, Superman briefly flies outside of Earth's atmosphere, despite the movie establishing that he needs to breathe. Although he might have been holding his breath.
• OK In The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the protagonists travel to the Moon via hot air balloon. Justified, as it's a Mind Screw fantasy film and the Moon is depicted as a rather surreal place.
• Wrong - powers In Men in Black 3 the antagonist Boris the Animal is a member of the boglodite alien species, and is able to survive in the vacuum of space, as shown in the movie's opening in which he escapes from a prison on the Moon by blasting a hole through a wall causing a huge decompression that kills everyone else.
• OK The silent film Woman in the Moon, despite being one of the few early sci-fi movies where the creators paid attention to technical accuracy. This was because silent film actors depended greatly on facial expressions and body language which would be obscured by bulky spacesuits and helmets.
• Wrong - atmosphere Avatar: Colonel Quaritch runs out of the building protecting humans from Pandora's toxic atmosphere to shoot at the fleeing heroes. Then one of his (suited-up) soldiers gives him a gasmask.

Literature

• Wrong - powers Reginald Martin (under the pen-name E.C.Elliot) wrote a series of fourteen juvenile SF books featuring protagonist Kemlo and his friends, the "spaceborn". Merely by being born on an orbital space station, they gained the power to "breathe" in space, and needed to wear protective suits to enter an atmosphere.
• Wrong - powers In Donald Moffitt's Second Genesis, the "cuddlies" have evolved to survive in space for extended periods. They have adaptations such as extra lungs, nictitating membranes across the eyes, sealable nostrils, and the ability to supersaturate their cells with oxygen like whales. Presumably they also have toughened skin and bodies to prevent the pressure in their own bodies from rupturing its way out.
• OK In From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, soon-to-be-shot-into-space adventurer Michael Ardan is asked whether it is not foolish, since there is little if no air on the Moon? "Then I will only breathe on special occasions!" he quips.
  • This book was written in 1865. That so much of it was correct is rather eerie.
• Wrong - atmosphere The Discworld novel The Last Hero deals with a Magitek spacecraft despatched from the Disc which, while this was wholy unintended, ended up landing on the Discworld's Moon. It is noticeable that the Moon has an atmosphere which while thinner, is breathable. This is handWaved on the grounds that the gravitational field of the Moon is sufficient to hold its own air; Terry Pratchett explicitly states that while never totally absent, the air gets a lot thinner away from the major planetary bodies. (The first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, has the protaganist actually falling off the Discworld and realising sufficent air to breathe will be a problem, at least for a few minutes or so, while things resolve themselves.)
  • The book is also a satire, though a lot of the humor seems to be anachronistic.
• Unsure - hitchhiker's guide is weird In Life, the Universe and Everything, the gang is able to stand on a bare asteroid after Slartibartfast extended an SEP field over them, thus making the problem of lack of air "Somebody Else's." Which is pretty irresponsible when you think about it... Or rather not, as the concept of the SEP field is better summarized "not MY problem".
  • Exactly how it functions in this instance is left unexplained since it's implied that an SEP field is only effective if one is unaware of it, and that it can only mask the presence of something rather than create something; so while Arthur and his friends might have willingly wandered out into the vacuum of space under the illusion that the lack of air was "somebody else's problem", they would have immediately asphyxiated since the SEP field could not have actually created a breathable atmosphere.
• Wrong - powers Sergei Pavlov's Moon Rainbow series feature some humans who entered into a symbiotic relationship with a (non-sentient) race of living Nanomachines, which apparently could do an instant and reversible matter-energy conversion on the whim, and thus acquired a whole bunch of cool super powers. One of these powers was that they didn't actually need to breathe anymore, as the symbiotes would supply required oxygen directly into the cells through the energy-matter conversion.
  But convincing one's own body that it doesn't need to do one of its most important functions was another matter entirely. One of the main characters used up all his oxygen (it's a long story) and ended up suffering an extremely frustrating and futile desire to breathe... for a good six hours after his last bottle died. Though, he was still new to his powers yet.
• Unsure - probably a subversion Barrington Baley's The garments of Caean some of heroes (like Alexei Verednyev and his girlfriend Lana Armasova) just live in space. They know they can. They are colonists who wear their advanced spacesuits/miniships their whole live. Their cyborg opponents also can do that but don't need suits and looks mostly-human. He thought that members of research expeditions are cyborgs because of how they look and because they tried to extract him from the suit.
• Wrong - powers In the Animorphs series, it's revealed that Andalites do not require space suits, instead simply wearing masks with a breathable gas that prevents decompression. It's... considerably less efficient for humans, and merely draws out the process of suffocation in space.
• Unsure - powers Spider Robinson's Stardance novels wind up with humanity dividing into air-breathers and space-farers, through the consumption of some reddish gunk found in Titan's atmosphere. The spacers can live quite normally in vacuum with their biological symbiote/suits.
• Wrong - powers Diane Duane's Door into Shadow depicts dragons who are able to fly light-years through space without breathing.
• Wrong - powers H. P. Lovecraft's work features not one, but three alien species, not counting the famed Cthulhu himself, who are capable of flying through space completely naked. Cthulhu, the Byakhee and the Mi-Go may get a pass, since they're explicitly said to be extradimensional beings made of exotic matter, but the Starfish Aliens known as the Elder Things are not. It is explained that they "absorbed certain chemicals" in preparation for their journey through space, though at least on Earth the required knowledge was later lost.
• OK In the sci-fi series Akiko, this is handwaved hilariously when the eponymous character takes her first trip into space in a roofless shuttle—there's plenty of air in space!
• Wrong - powers In John Varley's Eight Worlds books and stories, wherein humanity has been driven from the Earth by enigmatic aliens and is forced to live on the other worlds of the Solar System, humans are often fitted with a portable force-field generator which operates automatically when they walk from pressurised to unpressurised areas. The force-fields merge when brought together so that people can embrace and make love in vacuum. Meanwhile, in the rings of Saturn, the Symbs are humans who live in symbiosis with biological, semi-sentient spacesuits. They spend their entire lives in vacuum, the symbiots providing them with all the oxygen they need and recycling their waste for nutrition via photosynthesis.
• Wrong - powers In a novel from Star Trek: The Lost Era, a Neyel transported aboard a ship after being blown out into space isn't quite dead after all; it turns out Neyel have engineered themselves to survive vacuum for a time. As is pointed out, they're not the only race who can survive space; mention is made of the Nasat, a nod to Starfleet Corps of Engineers.
• Wrong - powers In Star Wars Legends, the Givin race evolved on a world whose wacky lunar orbits regularly robbed areas of atmosphere. As a result the Givin developed an exoskeleton that doubles as a spacesuit. The Force Did It.
• Wrong - atmosphere In Know No Fear, Roboute Guilliman is vented into space and presumed dead. Several chapters later, he reappears none the worse for wear. The book explains that the ship carries thin layer of atmosphere around the hull to avoid decompression of hangars when shuttles come and go, which is why he survived. It helps that he's a Super-Soldier to the super-soldiers.
• Wrong - powers In Book of the Short Sun, the alien Inhumi are supposedly able to fly unaided and unprotected between planets. It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide whether this is actually possible, even in-universe.
• Wrong - powers Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka has the Oswaft, aliens who evolved in space and were perfectly happy there, absorbing enough loose atoms in a nebula to grow bigger than aircraft carriers. They could even do hyperspace jumps.
• Wrong - powers Peter F. Hamilton's Fallen Dragon has some people encounter immense creatures engineered to serve as a kind of galactic library. They orbit red giant stars and live off the radiation and the matter in the solar wind.
• Wrong - powers In The Pride of Parahumans parahumans can survive without air for about an hour, ten minutes conscious. And they can function in vacuum with nothing more than a helmet for a long time. Their eardrums are still vulnerable to Explosive Decompression though.
• OK In The Platinum Key the characters can breathe in space in the Jumbo vortex, although the reason is unknown.
• Wrong - aversion/powers In Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, Kostya assumes that, being a very powerful vampire, he should be able to survive in space long enough to teleport to a space station and proceed with his plan. He's wrong. Due to how magic works in the setting, there's no magic in space.
• OK - is also hilarious The last third of The Divine Comedy is entirely set in space and there's no mention that our very human protagonist has any problem breathing as he jumps off the Sun and flies to Mars. To be fair, this was written in 1324, so NASA didn't have the funding to correct Dante's error.
• OK In Marvin Wanted MORE!, the titular sheep somehow manages to breathe in space in order to eat the entire Earth.
• Wrong - powers In My Brother is a Superhero, this turns out to be the intended purpose of Zack's Super Not-Drowning Skills.
• Wrong - powers In Dad, Are You the Tooth Fairy?, Gabi's dad claims that there used to be magical creatures, but they had to leave "because of technology", and that they may have escaped to "the stars" or be living on the moon now.
• Wrong - powers In the Fairy Oak series, Telli has been able to see the stars up close without a spacesuit (as these don't exist). Partly justified, as she is a fairy.

Live-Action TV

• OK Done by the Aquabats in The Aquabats! Super Show!.
  'MC Bat Commander: Love that space air!
• Wrong - aversion Battlestar Galactica (2003) featured a season 3 episode where the Chief and Cally are forced to do an unprotected spacewalk (really just a jump into a waiting Raptor) when an airlock malfunctions and seals them in. Treated pretty realistically, Cally is in pretty bad shape afterwards but the Chief is mostly OK, but then he IS a cylon and thus can be expected to be a bit tougher to environmental hazards.
• Doctor Who:
  • Wrong - powers It is established that due to their alien biology, Time Lords such as the Doctor can survive in the vacuum of space without the need for external protection.
    • However, while Time Lords do not need space suits, they still need oxygen to breathe. There was one notable instance in which the Fifth Doctor had to go outside a ship into the vacuum of space, but all he took with him was an oxygen tank from a medical kit. Other episodes establish that Time Lords have a "respiratory bypass", which allows them to survive being strangled. It's not clear if this means a Time Lord can survive for even longer periods in space, although they would be unconscious (whereas the Fifth Doctor needed to repair something on the outside of the ship so he had to stay conscious, so he took oxygen with him).
    • In "Oxygen", the Doctor survives a spacewalk helmetless, after he had to give his helmet to Bill because her suit was malfunctioning. The surviving miners don't know how he did it. But he doesn't survive unscathed — he gets blinded due to lack of oxygen, it not being clear exactly how long they were outside.
  • OK Not in space, mind you, but close: in "Terror of the Zygons", the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane are trapped in a hyperbaric chamber being drained of oxygen. He puts Sarah into a trance, telling her she does not need to breathe, then puts himself into one until they are rescued.
  • Unsure In "Nightmare of Eden", the Fourth Doctor puts himself in a hypnotic trance to survive a shuttle trip without benefit of oxygen.
  • Wrong Taken to heavy levels in "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe", where the Eleventh Doctor can not only breathe, but can talk in space without the need of a spacesuit or space helmet (He still needs a spacesuit, as he falls to Earth afterwards). Possibly the ship's artificial atmosphere was still functioning, though it's not mentioned.
  • OK "The Rings of Akhaten" is the most insane example in the new series. Everyone is going around in a planetary ring system that appears to be open to the vacuum of space. The only explanation is that there's probably some kind of atmospheric shell — but this is not brought up in the episode.
  • Wrong - powers "The Tsuranga Conundrum": The Pting doesn't breathe oxygen, and is unaffected by the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - powers For the most part, Farscape manages to avoid this trope, the exception being D'Argo. Apparently Luxans can survive unprotected in space for "a quarter-arn", and in the miniseries he uses this ability to keep someone else alive longer than they normally could have.
  • OK In the mini-arc "Look At The Princess", John Crichton manages to hold his breath long enough to float from one craft to another. Even though the air pressure will rupture your lungs, that's why you don't hold your breath in a vacuum, though that's the least of that scene's problems with science . . .
• Wrong - powers Becomes a plot point in Kamen Rider Fourze The Movie where Gentaro finally realizes that his dream girl Nadeshiko isn't human.
  • This happens again in #47 with Kengo Utahoshi, which is used in his reveal that he was born from the Core Switch.
• OK Lexx gives its human characters spacesuits consisting of... a helmet with a plastic visor covering the eyes. That's all. But it it's all part of the charm.
  • Wrong - powers Kai justifiably doesn't wear one because he is undead and has no need for breathing or life support. He strolls around outer space in his normal outfit.
• OK Lois & Clark sees Superman hanging around in space without any protective gear. Then, just as everyone's convinced that he can do that because he's Superman, he takes Lois for a trip up there with him. Without any sort of breathing apparatus. And has a conversation with her there.
• OK Mystery Science Theater 3000: Mike and Pearl occasionally sit in the open door of Pearl's space-worthy VW Bus. But if you're wondering how they eat and breathe, and other science facts, just repeat to yourself "It's just a show, I should really just relax".
  • In the KTMA "Season Zero", there is a series of episodes where Joel is absent, as the bots locked him out of the Satellite as a prank. When he makes it back inside and they question his survival, he tells them to relax.
• Wrong - atmosphere Planet Ajay: This show takes place on the eponymous India-like planet, and every character is able to breathe on the planet with no problems whatsoever. The only character who wears a spacesuit in the show is Bud the astronaut, and even then nothing happens in the series that confirms if he can actually breath Planet Ajay's air without a spacesuit.
• OK Power Rangers plays this one mostly straight. Power Rangers Lost Galaxy's Mike was able to survive, albeit unconsciously, in the vacuum of space, while Power Rangers in Space's Carlos could take an unmorphed little girl for a ride on his Galaxy Glider. Most egregiously, the team-up episode "Forever Red" features the villains riding horses on the moon.
  • Stingwingers bodily disembarked from the Scorpion Stinger into the vacuum of space to destroy two of the Megazords in the episode "Journey's End".
  • Ironically, the villains themselves were robots, and would naturally have no problem with vacuum. The horses, on the other hand, were, to all appearances, perfectly normal horses.
    • There are canonically indigenous bats living on the moon in the PR universe, per Turbo. Plus, Merrick's Ranger form is named for the LUNAR wolf... which stops being silly when you consider the lifeforce of his monstrous Org alter ego Zen-Aku is bound to the moon's own ecosystem.
  • Rita, Zedd, Finster, Goldar, and Rito wander around the surface of the moon to no ill effect for the entire second half of Power Rangers Zeo. They even watch television. There's something approaching an Earth-normal atmosphere there.
  • Additionally, in the In Space Crossover episode "Shell Shocked", the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can also breathe in space — they go for a ride on the Rangers' Galaxy Gliders. In a bit of meta-irony, the TMNT franchise died (until 2003) shortly after.
  • It's generally assumed that Rita made the moon (or at least the area her palace is in) habitable with her magic when she first set up shop there and it remains so to this day. However, that doesn't explain the unprotected girl on the Galaxy Glider, hair blowing in the wind that space totally shouldn't have. (And no, it doesn't matter that the scene was identical in Megaranger; that just means two production companies fail science forever.)
• OK In Red Dwarf: "Confidence and Paranoia," Confidence tries to invoke this trope while outside of the ship with Lister. Lister refuses to go along. Confidence then tries to encourage him by taking off his own space helmet and explodes.
• Wrong - powers The Martian Manhunter on Smallville not only can survive in space, being in Earth's atmosphere actually inhibits his Healing Factor. Well, he is from Mars; air's a lot less thick and oxygenated over there.
• OK - seems like story-in-a-story Star Trek: Voyager. In "The Adventures of Captain Proton" holoprogram Tom Paris is seen jetpacking through the vacuum of space protected only by a leather jacket and aviator goggles. Since it's an Affectionate Parody of 1930s sci-fi film serials, even the slightest semblance of realism isn't on the cards.
• Unsure - powers In the Ultra Series, it seems that pretty much every non-human character is capable of breathing in space. Ultras regularly fly back and forth through space between Earth and M78, kaiju fly through space or are carried out of Earth's atmosphere without any trouble, and even the aliens who do get about using spacecraft are still able to fight the Ultras in space.

Music Videos

• ZCE Major Tom in this video for Space Oddity.
• OK - subversion Rammstein in their video for "Amerika", where they appear on the Moon in astronaut suits but without helmets. Since the Moon surface where they perform is revealed In-Universe to be just a set.

Pinball

• OK If the backglass and Astral Finale of Junk Yard are taken into consideration, the player character flies into space with nothing but a fish bowl for oxygen.
• OK The Match Sequence for The Party Zone shows Captain B. Zarr flying through outer space in his rocket, with the cockpit open and exposing him to vacuum with no ill effects.

Tabletop Games

• OK - ordinary humans can survive in space The Rule of Fun/Cool physics of the Dungeons & Dragons setting Spelljammer allow this: there is no oxygen in space, but whenever an object goes into space, it takes an "envelope" of air with it. So everyone can breathe in space, for a minute or handful on their own. The amount of air is proportional to the size of the object, which helps the crew of a huge ship, but not a giant, for example, since it uses proportionally as much air. After a while, the air becomes stale and eventually runs out, though far-traveling ships usually avoid it with air-creating spells or plants. Escape velocity or burning up in the atmosphere aren't problems — if you go up high enough, you end up in space, simple as that. All of this was designed to allow Space Pirates to stand on the decks of their wooden ships... In Space. Incidentally, the way gravity works is even weirder.
  
  And that's within the solar system-containing crystal spheres. Outside, the universe is filled with volatile, gaseous phlogiston. You still have to worry about running out of air, but if you do, breathing phlogiston places living things in suspended animation. People preserved thusly can be revived even millennia later by giving them fresh air, with only a slight chance of death from shock. Putting people in airtight coffins for trips between crystal spheres makes for the ultimate budget travel option!
• Wrong - powers Warhammer 40,000:
  • Space Marines can survive in space even without their Powered Armor for a prolonged periods of time. They're two metres tall Super Soldiers with bulletproof chests and can survive on a healthy diet of concrete and metal, so this doesn't receive much attention. They achieve this by holding their breath for quite some time, having specific adaptations that can create a hardened layer over the skin as a sort of organic vacuum suit and the ability to voluntarily enter a sort of deep coma with a metabolic rate near zero.
  • Primarchs. During the Battle of Calth, Roboute Guilliman was blown into space where he spent hours clinging to the spaceship hull. After that he still had enough strength left in him to find some Word Bearers and punch their heads off. With just his fists, not a powerfist, while still in space and despite Word Bearers being in power armor.
  • Ordo Xenos inquisitor Amberley Vail mentioned that Genestealers can keep operating in vacuum for surprisingly large amounts of time. Vacuum does kill Genestealers eventually, but quite a lot of people were ambushed in void by them.
• Wrong - powers Old World of Darkness:
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse features a type of shapeshifting wererats known as the Munchmausen Ratkin who, in addition to ignoring temperatures of absolute zero or burning hot lava, don't suffocate in a vacuum. It's heavily implied that they can do this because they're batshit insane.
  • In Mage: The Ascension, mages could breathe in space. Technocracy mages could not, since they were committed to a worldview (!) that included "no air in space". (One sourcebook recommends recruiting any Technocracy mage who can breathe in space, because they're clearly rejecting Technocracy views or they'd die trying this.)
• Wrong - powers Vampire: The Requiem notes that vampires technically can breathe in space. Then again, isn't the inability and lack of need to breathe, regardless of environment, one of the key qualities in defining a vampire?
• Unsure Another Rule of Cool/Rule of Funny example is Tales from the Floating Vagabond. The owner of the titular bar installed an atmosphere generator. The setting notes that races discover they can breathe in space as soon as the light from the bar's sign reaches them.
• Wrong - powers This can be simulated in games that feature superpowers. GURPS can simulate it nicely with enough points. It's even (relatively) cheaper in Mutants & Masterminds, being somewhat in-genre.
• Wrong - powers In Eclipse Phase any morph with the "Vacuum Sealing" augmentation can survive in space, so long as they have air.
• Wrong - powers Starfinder: Star Shamans start the game with the ability to breathe in space and immunity to other unpleasant effects of vacuum exposure.

Theme Parks

• OK Space Mountain at the Disney Theme Parks sends guests off into outer space in completely-exposed rockets, and yet they are able to breathe just fine.
• OK At Universal Studios:
  • E.T. Adventure brings guests up into space and into lightspeed towards E.T.'s planet, all without them needing to wear any gear.
  • In Space Fantasy: The Ride, similar to Space Mountain, has riders blast through outer space in an exposed vehicle.

Toys

• OK The toy that led to the original snarkiness was a Batman figure from the original Justice League toy line. Several characters were given "space armor" to go with recolored "space" versions of their older toys. Batman's helmet was an inexplicable half-bubble that only came up to eye level, as this image◊ from the trope naming webcomic Shortpacked! shows.

Video Games

• OK This has made into official Batman media as of LEGO Batman 3. Specifically, Robin jokingly asks Batman why he needs a spacesuit, having always thought, well, you know.
• OK During the last level of Binary Boy, both the Boy and a few other humanoid characters can walk around in space without protection just fine (even though the Boy did need a scuba mask when going underwater.)
• OK - rewrite There are 2 moon maps in Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2, and, since this example is on this page. you'd be correct to guess there's no sort of sustaining tech for either the Plants or Zombies.
• OK Played for laughs in Double Dragon Neon. While on a rocket powered ten floor pagoda, Billy and Jimmy only need to hold their breath to go outside the space ship. During those sections you can visibly see their cheeks are puffed out.
  Billy: We'd better hold our breath, this is a hard vacuum.
  Jimmy: Good idea, bro!
• OK DuckTales NES game:
  • It has a moon level, yet Scrooge McDuck doesn't get sprites of him in a space suit. Parodied here:
    "Wait, Uncle Scrooge you need a suit out there! How are you alive? You need heat! Also air!"
  • The remake finally explains why Scrooge can do that. He's been chewing oxygen-flavored taffy (though this doesn't explain how he can survive the extreme cold and lack of air pressure, among other things).
• OK Duke Nukem waffles on this. In Duke Nukem 3D, Duke can handle the vacuum of space just fine with only a t-shirt and a cigar for defense. In Duke Nukem Forever however, Duke needs to hold his breath to walk on the surface of the moon. Still Beyond the Impossible, but it seems that Duke's spacesuit-grade lungs went the same way as his ability to carry more than two guns at once during his twelve year break. Duke is seen wearing a spacesuit on the postcards that came with the Balls of Steel Edition of Forever (also featured on the walls in a few spots in the casino level.) Presumably Duke didn't want to demasculate the other astronauts when that shot was taken. Space Suit was an planned inventory item that would have activated automatically like the Scuba Gear. In the pre-release 1.0 demo leak, it changes Duke's speed/physics to moon conditions while letting him survive in the vacuum of space. However, only one such vacuum area was built (in the level Dark Side) so the Space Suit was turned into a decorative sprite, and the vacuum area was altered slightly with a forcefield so that it could be played normally. It's still in the Zoo demo level, so its cutting must have been a late one.
• Unsure Final Fantasy IV has the party travel to the moon. They can walk around on the moon without needing anything to help them breathe. Though it is an artificial moon that was home to the species Cecil's father was a part of, so there may be air.
• Wrong Half-Life:
  • In Half-Life The aliens that live on Xen before being teleported to Earth all appear to be able to breathe as well. Either they can all Breathe in Space, or Xen has some form of atmosphere similar to Earth.
  • In Portal, Chell, seems to get by okay on the moon for a good twenty seconds or so, although this is presumably with all the air from Aperture Science being sucked toward her through the portal she placed up there (plus, in Real Life, death in vacuum is neither guaranteed nor instantaneous, popular portrayals notwithstanding), and she does ultimately pass out once brought back to Earth.
• Wrong - not intended During the first level of Halo 2, it's possible to push Sergeant Johnson out of an airlock and onto the outer hull of the Cairo space station. He survives, despite wearing only his dress uniform. While some would argue that Johnson is just that, it's probably due more to a programming oversight.
• OK - inversion Inverted in Kerbal Space Program — the Kerbals wear full spacesuits everywhere, even on their Earth-like home planet. They only remove their helmets in pressurized crew containers. This is lampshaded by some of the science blurbs on Kerbin: "I don't think a spacesuit was really necessary to get here, was it?"
• OK The Kirby series featured many levels or scenes that take place in space, most of them with the little pink hero traveling on the Warp Star. In Kirby Mass Attack, Daroach even lampshades it when talking about a level that takes place on an asteroid: "How can you even breathe in space?" The oddest thing may not even be him surviving - since he's an alien - but the fact Kirby is still able to vacuum up everything in sight when there is no air. Mass Attack is also where Kirby is too weak to survive underwater any more but space seems to take less effort.
  • Kirby's not the only character this applies to either; Ribbon has no trouble traveling through space on the back of the crystal in Kirby 64 and Meta Knight just needs his Cape Wings to travel between planets in Kirby Super Star Ultra.
• Mass Effect:
  • OK In Mass Effect, every squad member wears a completely sealed helmet in any remotely hazardous location, including ones without any atmosphere. Mass Effect 2 lets this slide; half the team wears nothing more than a breath mask in hard vacuum (only Tali and Garrus wear complete spacesuits, even if Garrus' has a damaged collar). Special mention to Jack, who goes about in her usual Stripperiffic outfit and a breath mask.
  • first half wrong, second half OK In Mass Effect 3, DLC squadmate Javik doesn't wear so much as an oxygen mask in vacuum. Apparently, Protheans really can breathe in space. This is also the result of certain DLC looks for squaddies — Ashley and James can apparently survive with just a visor or headset.
  • Wrong - powers According to the Codex for Mass Effect: Andromeda, the kett (or at least kett Chosen) can temporarily survive in the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - powers In Metroid Prime, not only can Ridley breathe in space, he can fly in space by flapping his wings. This is easily hand waved by the fact that at this point, Ridley is more machine than dragon. His wings are made of force field and the flapping can be chalked up to muscle memory. What isn't so easily hand waved is how a seemingly non cybernetic Ridley was able to fly from the Ceres Research station to planet Zebes in Super Metroid. Oddly enough, in Metroid Zero Mission he does fly a spaceship to the surface of Zebes.
• Wrong - powers At the end of Persona 3, the main character's Universe Persona allows him to levitate unaided into outer space for the final battle. Then again, he makes the trip from Earth to the core of Nyx's embodiment (the Moon) in just a minute or two from everyone's perspective, so some sort of metaphysical transportation might be involved. Whichever the reason is, it is presumably why he doesn't need a spacesuit.
• Wrong - not real space, realistic-ish survival length In Persona 5, one level has the characters jumping through airlocks into the vacuum of space for very short periods of time. They state that a human can survive in space for 30 seconds or so as long as they keep their eyes and mouth shut. But it's a mental world as well, so it's not like it follows the rules of physics of the real world to begin with.
• OK Ratchet from Ratchet & Clank can survive wearing no protection on baby planets that logically shouldn't hold any atmosphere. He did gain an O2 helmet in the first game and presumably still has it — not that they alter his model to include it in any of the subsequent games. The mask still leaves his upper face and tail exposed to hard vacuum with no ill effects.
  • Wrong - powers Curiously, in the Gemlik Base level in the first game, Captain Qwark is inexplicably able to breathe and talk in the open vacuum of space when confronting Ratchet, who needed an O2 mask just to transverse the level. This is odd considering Up Your Arsenal had him bragging about how he spent six days clinging to Dr. Nefarious' spaceship, while holding his breath the whole trip.
  • Unsure In Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, Ratchet has a helmet with a visor that normally only covers his eyes, but it extends to cover his whole face and a rebreather appears automatically upon Ratchet entering a vacuum, diving underwater, or entering certain toxic atmospheres. There are still some baby planets where the rebreather doesn't activate, but these worlds also tend to have plants and animals that are apparently doing just fine out there, so this trope may still be in effect.
    • Plus in the Future games, the O2 mask was changed from a full helmet to a small face mask.
• OK Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • It varies in the games; most stages set in space don't have a problem with breathing, but there are some exceptions, especially any stage where only Super forms are permitted. Whether the need for Super Mode is due to problems breathing or need for the power of hovering/flight generally granted by such forms can be somewhat unclear. It may be possible that the other space station-based stages have artificial atmosphere. Strangely, even though they can survive in a vacuum, Sonic and co. can still drown if they stay underwater for too long.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, even though characters can get sucked out of the space station through broken windows, none of them have any trouble breathing in the vacuum when they venture outside.
• Wrong - powers While Terrans in Starcraft all wear heavy powered armor that doubles as an environment suit, zerg and protoss foot-soldiers seem to have no problems whatsoever operating in the vacuum of space without protective gear. While the manual handwaves this for the zerg as the result of their having assimilated a spaceborne race in the backstory, there's no explanation for why the protoss can breathe in space. They may not need to as they don't have any recognizable mouth or nostrils through which to breathe anyway. A close look at the victory screen when playing as protoss reveals what appears to be a respirator, as well. Their shields may also play a part. It's since been shown that the protoss are photosynthetic, they only need light to survive.
• Wrong - unintentional In the Space battles in Star Wars: Battlefront 2, there exists a glitch where you can exit a capital ship without a fighter, and (after some frustration) walk around on top of it. Gravity works as normal, and you don't take any damage. However, on Polis Massa, as you take steady damage outside of the facility (unless you are playing a droid. One wonders why the sealed clone and stormtrooper armor fails to protect its wearers.)
• Super Mario Bros. series
  • Wrong In Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Mario needed a spacesuit to survive in Space Zone.
  • OK In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, he didn't need anything to breathe, either on the moon or in transit to it. Even though travel consisted of being shot from a cannon. Goombella realizes and lampshades this if you ask her about the moonbase's entryway.
  • OK In Super Mario Galaxy, a luma is put in Mario's cap to give him the ability to travel through space, which apparently includes breathing as if it were filled with air. This isn't the problem, it's that everyone else can breathe just fine with no such justification, with the issue never being brought up. Then again, there is a conspicuous "woosh" sound when Mario flies from planet to planet; maybe that space is filled with air...
  • OK And then in Super Paper Mario, despite having gone to the moon and back in the preceding game, Tippi will insist that you need to get a "space helmet" (Which is just an empty goldfish bowl) before you can start chapter 4 proper. You're then given the option to be a wise guy by refusing to put it on, with an appropriate result.
  • Unsure Mario Sports Mix gave us the star ship. Not only is it in space, but also right next to the sun and in the middle of a meteor shower. And yet no one suffers negative effects from it. You are even rewarded for catching the meteors.
  • OK In Super Mario Odyssey, Mario can explore the Moon Kingdom without needing a space suit; he can get one, but he doesn't need to wear it. Similarly, Bowser, Peach, the Broodals, various enemies and every other sentient species from throughout the game can breathe in space too.
• Mario Kart
  • OK Most Rainbow Road incarnations. It's best noticeable on the Nitro Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 8, where the background Toads need spacesuits, but the racers don't.
  • Wrong - Super Not-Drowning Skills The mostly underwater Dolphin Shoals in Mario Kart 8 has a bunch of Toads in scuba gear hanging out near the finish line, but the racers don't.
• Unsure - zce The PS2 Rogue Galaxy, like Spelljammer, takes Rule of Cool and runs with it for the Space Pirate concept.
• Super Robot Wars series:
  • Wrong According to Mazinger Z, the Boss Borot has an open-air cockpit. But when Mazinger Z appears in Super Robot Wars, the Boss Borot can be deployed in space just fine without apparent modifications (it will perform like due to having a terrible rating for space combat, but in both Mazinger Z and Super Robot Wars the Boss Borot is a Joke Character anyways). This actually has a justification: any mech (not just Borot) that isn't airtight simply has the pilot wear a spacesuit.
  • Wrong - powers Also, Rom Stoll can talk in space as he does his lectures. However, he's a robot.
  • Unsure Whenever Yoko uses her sniper rifle attack of the Yoko M Tank on outer space terrain in Super Robot Wars Z2.
  • OK In Super Robot Wars V, Ange somehow can fire her machine gun out of her cockpit in space.
  • OK In Super Robot Wars X, Wataru exits Ryuoumaru in his final attack. This can be done even in outer space.
• OK La Tale has several dungeons that take place both inside and outside a space station. The only effect it has on you is an enhanced jumping ability.
• Wrong - not real space Touhou Project: Anyone can breathe in space... as long as it's the fantasy version. If you cross the border of the fantastic and the real when you're on the moon, you die.
  • Unsure The true final stage of Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night takes place halfway between Earth and Moon. One of the heroines actually lampshades it.
  • OK In Silent Sinner in Blue, Sakuya opens a window while inside a flying spaceship.
  • OK During Tenshi's Last Spell in Touhou Hisouten ~ Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, you are fighting on top of stone pillars reaching above the atmosphere.
• OK TumblePop has the last two levels set in outer space and on the Moon, but the sprite of the main characters remains the same.
• Wrong - powers Xenosaga has chaos able to survive in space (for an unspecified amount of time) and talk too. He's the personification of Anima and (the power behind) Jesus and spends the first nine-tenths of the plot sandbagging so hard.
• OK The Super Smash Bros. series plays this straight with the Star Fox stages. Brawl actually parodies this with one of Fox's Codec conversations, where Slippy gives this trope quite the Lampshade Hanging. You can hear more about it right here.
• OK Space Channel 5 is inconsistent with this one. Some levels show Ulala in outer space while wearing a full spacesuit, but at the end of the game she leads a parade through hard vacuum without even an oxygen supply.
• OK Starkiller in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. He flees the planet Kamino in Darth Vader's starfighter, the TIE Advanced x1. Every official schematic of said vehicle asserts that it has no life support system (Like every other part of the TIE line, hence why the TIE Pilots wear those costumes).
  • The reason of which is another, more logical example in the SWU at large. Darth Vader, thanks to his "armor" being a glorified life-support system, is essentially always in a space suit. Early drafts of a A New Hope even had him fly through space (The Force?).
• OK Putt-Putt and Pep can breathe in space perfectly well in Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon. Strangely, Pep does wear a helmet at first, but loses it as soon as they land on the moon.
• Wrong - powers Breathing in space is no problem for the deities of Asura's Wrath. Same with The Gohma, or (Evil) Ryu and Akuma in the DLC. Their loose clothing flaps in Dramatic Wind with no care for the vacuum of space.
• Unsure - powers The final chapter of Bayonetta takes place in deep space, where Jeanne rescues Bayonetta by hitching a ride on a rocket with her Badass Bike, and the latter fights a frigging god that she was trapped in. No mention is made on how Bayonetta and Jeanne can survive hard vacuum, but being that they are WITCHES, well...
• Wrong - powers In Kid Icarus: Uprising, everyone can breathe in space with no problem. Then again, that's probably the least unrealistic (and most consistent) aspect of space in that game, plus we don't see any mortals from Earth up there, just demons, space pirates, and an angel or two. Pit has to hold his breath underwater, but only Earth's water, not in the liquid flowing through Celestial Sea where he fights Space Pirates(no, there isn't actually a sea in space but there is a creek to splash around in said sea region).
• Wrong - powers Lampshaded in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten: During the penultimate chapter, the protagonists go to the moon to stop the Big Bad's plans of destroying the world. Fuka, the only human in the group, immediately notices that she can breathe normally. Fenrich explains that angels and demons don't need oxygen, neither does Fuka, because she's technically dead.
• OK While all units in MechWarrior Living Legends are air-tight and have closed life support systems, nothing particularly bad happens to the pilot of a BattleMech or a Battlearmor when their cockpit is breached and exposed to the elements — even on a map like Extremity or Inferno.
• Wrong - powers They can't exactly breathe in space, but according to the X-Universe's X-Encyclopedia the Paranid can survive unprotected in hard vacuum for about forty minutes on average.
• Unsure Lampshaded in Lunar Defense Force, a fangame in which Shroobs are about to invade Equestria and Princess Luna fights them on the moon.
  Shroob number whatever: Am I the only one who can't breathe?
• Unsure The ending of Super Heroine Chronicle has both Original Generation girls Noel Kazamatsuri and Meru Ransheru to breathe and talk in space. They also stop a space ship that somehow is attracted to Earth's gravity when said space ship is nowhere near Earth.
• OK In X-Wing, this runs into Fridge Logic, hard. Canonically, most Rebel pilots don't have fully-sealed and self-contained helmets. Since in the films they don't seem to have ejection seats either, this isn't as problematic as it could be. However, as a game mechanic in the flight simulator, your X-Wing, A-Wing, B-Wing or Y-Wing is given an ejection seat... but the same non-enclosed helmet. Rebels can breathe in space?
  • reply mode - add to main bullet We never see anyone eject in the films, but dialogue indicates that they can (and specifically that Porkins should).
• Unsure - powers In Rodina, the xenos can be found patrolling airless asteroids wearing armour which seemingly covers their torsos and backs of the heads, but leaves faces and limbs exposed to environment.
• OK Twisted Metal 1 and 2 involve the Roberts siblings being whisked up into outer space by Calypso twisting their wishes. Carl was stuck out there for a year, and when he and Jamie reunite later, they don't require any spacesuits to survive or converse in the vacuum.
• OK Utterly spoofed in the fangame Space Quest: Incinerations, where the laws of physics work in such a way that you can, in fact, breathe in space, among other impossible things. The first indication of this is in the introduction, where Roger Wilco, after waking up, groggily wanders around a spaceship trying to find some coffee, completely oblivious to the fact that the ship has been shot to pieces in a massive battle and is exposed to the vacuum all over.
• Wrong - powers One of the three possible final stages of Shippu Mahou Daisakusen is Kobold Tower, a tower so high it reaches into space. While most characters are in ships that can be presumed to be pressurized, several characters such as Miyamoto the dragon and Nirvana the fairy are clearly exposed to the vacuum of space, which seems to have absolutely no bearing on them whatsoever.
• OK There are several maps on Nexuiz and Xonotic which take place at platforms in outer space (Soylent, Evilspace in the former; Xoylent in the latter) or starships/floating factories where the player(s) can go outside (the eponymous Starship in the former; G-23 in the latter), yet few of the characters have any space suit to talk about.
• OK The same deal happens with OpenArena, having several maps taking place in space such as oa_pvomit, oa_shine, am_spacecont, suspended, wrackdm17 and czest1tourney, yet only a few characters (Grunt, Grism, Sarge, S_Marine) have a spacesuit or are even aliens/nonhumans (Liz, Merman, Skelebot).
• Wrong - powers Beatrix from Battleborn is capable of breathing in space. During Phoebe's DLC Story Operation, Beatrix mentions that in response to her tranquilizing and attempting to perform a "completely routine" brainstem biopsy on Attikus, the Thrall threw her out of an airlock. She however survived the vacuum of space as she had replaced her lungs long ago.
• OK In A Hat in Time, everyone can seemingly breathe in space just fine. The game's kicked off by a mafia member breaking into Hat Kid's spaceship (without a space suit), then at the end of the game all the villains end up hanging on the outside of the spaceship asking her not to leave, before being pushed off with a broom.
• OK - straight+powers In MDK2, the invading aliens apparently have no trouble working in vacuum without any protective gear or having large outdoor areas on their orbiter. This orbiter is apparently keeping all that air inside a forcefield because when Doctor Hawkins opens the airlock on his own spaceship Jim Dandy, all the air in the Unnecessarily Large Interior gets promptly blown out through it, including Hawkins himself if he doesn't find a way to pin himself to the floor. Even then he is in danger of suffocating... unless he puts on a fishbowl, which doesn't even fit tightly to his neck.
• OK One mission in Cosmic Star Heroine takes place on an asteroid floating through space, yet your party, mostly consisting of organic beings, walks on it wearing nothing more than their usual attire. The gravity also appears to be comfortable.
• OK Many Battletech missions take place on airless moons and martian-style environments. While BattleMechs are rated for hard vacuum in-universe (this is one of their major draws), most of the standard-issue vehicles that you can encounter in such missions are not. In addition, cracking open the cockpit of a 'mech does not put the MechWarrior inside at risk of decompression or atmospheric poisoning.
• OK Time Gal: Reika spends the later stages in outer space in nothing but a bikini.
• OK Aether: The boy and the creature can survive in the vacuum of space just fine.
• OK Punky Skunk: Punky, the Chews, and Badler spend the last stages of the game in outer space.

Web Animation

• OK Lampshaded at the very end of this Random Crap with Homestar Runner video:
  Cheesecake: [floating through space] Oh well. At least the continuity in this random series is non-existent. By the next episode, I'll probably be back home, safe and sound! Hey, wait a minute! How am I breathing?
  • Which gets lampshaded again by the very same character in Ze Pyromancers, at the end of this video as a Call-Back.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja:
  • Wrong - powers Ron Wizard can fly in space unprotected because he's a wizard.
  • Wrong - powers Sparklelord too. (Alt Text: "The unicorn does not need to worry about oxygen or pressure. He is a magical unicorn.")
• Wrong - not space Awful Hospital: Justified in the Abyss, a Void Between the Worlds that's completely devoid of Concepts. There's no air, but anything from The Multiverse that needs to breathe can do so in the Abyss, because the Concept of suffocation doesn't exist there either.
• Unsure - zce Parodied in Batman and Sons, in "Mr. BatMom"◊.
• Wrong - powers Turns out that Mab from Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures can breathe on the moon — what with the Fae being a race of Reality Warpers who run on Rule of Crazy, it's not really that surprising. The really interesting part here is that Pyroduck (who is a dragon) is wearing a spacesuit, which indicates that dragons (who are otherwise considered nearly as powerful as the Fae) CAN'T breathe in space. And also that Furrae apparently has some sort of space-program.
• Unsure - reference? Eddie of Emergency Exit is playing a tabletop rpg, and he wants to play as an astronaut who can breathe in space like Batman.
• Wrong - aversion Inverted in this Freefall strip, where Helix the robot learns why he can't survive in vacuum.
• Wrong - powers The president from the Galaga comic can breathe in space due to wizardry. He's also immune to Explosive Decompression.
• Unsure Gunnerkrigg Court: In-universe example — Dr. Disaster's simulation. Antimony notes that she has a lot more fun when she just doesn't think about it.
• Wrong - powers In A Miracle of Science, Captain Quevillion can breathe in space thanks to Sufficiently Advanced technology that holds a layer of air around her body. Fairly consistent technobabble is offered to justify this.
• Wrong - aversion Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows us that Peter Pan is unrealistic. Despite them still being able to fly in the comic.
• Wrong - aversion. pare down to the reference In Schlock Mercenary, the F'sherl-Ganni genetically modified themselves to let them survive in space for brief periods of time, while carbosilicate amorphs don't breathe in any normal sense (though they do have to protect their eyes from vacuum damage — by swallowing them). Trope namer referenced almost to the letter here, with Shortpacked! mentioned in that strip's note. And with a nice lampshading of the speaker's sanity. Not that it's a surprise to anyone at that point...
• OK Shortpacked! is the Trope Namer ("How would he know? Has he tried?"). More recent strips show that, while Bruce Wayne can breathe in space, Dick Grayson can't. One Bigger Than Cheeses comic lampshades this with the title "Breathing in space doesn't help on the Sun" — the comic itself is about what would really happen in a fight between Batman and Superman. Incidentally, while Batman can breathe in space, The Flash can't... oops!
• Wrong - powers Sluggy Freelance:
  • Aylee's species doesn't need to breathe and was originally found in the vacuum of space. When she forgets that humans do need to breathe, Hilarity Ensues.
  • Lodoze, a parody of Lobo, can apparently breathe in space because he's so tough. (Although, as Bun-bun puts it shortly before making short work of him, it's easy to be "tough" when you're completely invulnerable.)
• Wrong - powers Star Mares, being a Fusion Fic of Star Wars and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, features fighter pegasi who, while dressed like X-Wing and TIE Fighter pilots, can fly through space and fight without their fighter craft, with exposed wings, tails, and partially exposed heads. Rebels have the standard pilot helmet, while Imperials only have goggles over their eyes instead of the TIE Pilot helmet. Both do have gas masks over their muzzles to breathe, though, and other ponies do require full space suits. Rainbow Dash, however, plays it completely straight, not requiring any such equipment to survive in space.
• Wrong - powers Star Power: This is a standard power for the Star Powered Sentinels. Danica can even talk in space without issue.
• Wrong - powers Terinu: Terinu freaks his companions when he demonstrates this ability in an early issue of the comic. All There in the Manual explains that since his race was designed to be used as power sources on ships, they were designed with extreme survival measures in mind, with special mucous filling their lungs and nasal passages and forming a transparent shell over their eyes to prevent damage, and using their Bion abilities to provide energy to their bodies in lieu of blood oxygen.
• Wrong - powers The titular character of Vexxarr frequently makes space walks (or whatever his species does) with no more protection than a sweater. Apparently Bleen only need to breathe once a week or so, like eating. There's also the "rock crabs" who live in space and their silicoid predators.

Web Original

• OK Hadriex apparently can breathe and talk in space like it ain't nothing. As seen in this video.
• Unsure - powers It turns out that Tennyo from the Whateley Universe can fly through space, because she just doesn't need to breathe. Or other stuff. And, based on her DNA, she's not anything close to human.
• duplicate In Bowser's Kingdom episode 8, Jeff, Hal, and the rest of the Koopa Troop are seen in outer space. Jeff even questions how they're alive in space.
• OK The Adventures of Captain Bucky and his Space Marshals, in Outer Space. The intrepid space adventurers put on their Oxygen Rebreathing Atmospheric Lung helmets, but no spacesuits so the sexy legs and bare arms of The Squadette are still uncovered as they go moonwalking.
• OK Jeff lampshades the Super Mario Galaxy example and Hal agrees, but Bowser Jr. tells him to shut up in episode 8 of Bowser's Kingdom.

Western Animation

• OK The Amazing World of Gumball: Gumball doesn't have any problems breathing or even talking at space in "The Debt". He is also seen there with Penny and four planets in "The Compilation".
• OK Played straight with almost all the superheroes and villains in Atomic Puppet, including the title Kid Hero. The only exception is Mookie, but even then, the only thing he ever needs is the helmet (usually a makeshift glass bowl!). However, given Mookie has no powers unlike every other superhero or supervillain, the show's basic underlining seems to be that having superpowers automatically allows one to breathe in space.
• Wrong - powers The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: During a mission into outer space which Tony uses as an excuse to build custom spacesuits for every member of the team, the Hulk's suit consists entirely of a new pair of shorts and an oxygen mask hooked up to an air supply on his back. At the same time, Thor's spacesuit seems to be a suit of platemail armor with no faceguard on the helmet, leaving his face completely uncovered.
• Wrong - powers Avengers Assemble: One episode had Thor and the Hulk getting yelled at for breaking things by wrestling for fun in Avengers Tower, so they decided to finish their match on the Moon where they would not be disturbing the other Avengers.
• OK In Batman: The Brave and the Bold, during the first episode, Batman is shown occasionally in space without breathing gear. Plus, the breathing gear he gets is just a plastic covering of the mouth hole in his suit. Then again, with that hole plugged, the suit covered his entire body. Being that this was a heavily gadget-laden Batman, perhaps the suit was self-contained?
• Ben 10:
  • OK This was done in Alien Force. However since they were with a 100,000+ year old scientist that walked through time like it was nothing, they didn't bother to try to explain it. The so-crazy-he's-supersane scientist ignored the question.
    "What, how are we even breathing?"
    "An excellent question, but not even remotely the point."
  • Wrong - powers Ben 10 also features several alien species which can survive just fine in space, one of which Ben transformed into in order to continue fighting. In fact, it appears to be that everything can breathe in space except humans, since every time he's been in space his alien forms have been able to breathe.
  • OK Lampshaded in an episode of Ben 10: Omniverse, where after boarding a derelict spaceship Ben takes off his helmet without bothering to check whether there's still atmosphere. His new partner Rook asks how he knew it would be okay, and Ben just responds that it's never been a problem in the past.
• OK The very first episode of Biker Mice from Mars had this trope. When the mice are being pursued by Plutarkians, Vinnie gets up and opens a door on the side of their spacecraft and leans out to fire a bazooka at the Plutarkian ship. And it's quite clear that there's no airlock or anything like that.
• Wrong Torq from Buzz Lightyear of Star Command does this. And talks, too. And rides a rocket bike through space. Because he's a shameless Expy of Lobo (In a Disney Channel show!), down to being voiced by Brad Garrett.
• Unsure - zce Catscratch has the cats doing this in the premiere. Given that Doug TenNapel wrote it, you shouldn't be surprised.
• In the DC Animated Universe (particularly Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League), there is a general consensus that even metahumans can't breathe without oxygen — even Superman uses a Space suit or at least breathing gear. There are, however, a few exceptions.
  • Unsure Batman has snuck onto the Watchtower without the use of teleporters or shuttles, when it was in orbit. That's just how Batman rolls. He could be behind you right now.
  • Wrong - powers Lobo rides a rocket motorcycle through space without life support. He can also talk in space unaided, something no-one else in the DCAU can do.
  • Wrong - powers During the episode "The Return", a wave of superheroes attempts to stop Amazo before he enters orbit. Of them, only Superman needed special gear. Green Lantern gets a pass because his ring generates life support. S.T.R.I.P.E. does wear a suit of Powered Armor, so it's probably self-contained. Captain Atom is composed of pure energy and doesn't need to breathe. Orion's flight-rig can generate atmosphere. Starman isn't human. The only weird one in that mix was Dr. Light, who somehow copied GL's trick.
• Wrong - powers An especially funny moment in Superman: The Animated Series has Bizarro flying into space only to begin suffocating a few hundred kilometres out, forgetting that Bizarro needs oxygen badly.
• Wrong - powers The rule appears to have been revoked for Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (which is near enough to a DCAU story that it fits here), as Superman is shown in the first scenes flying unaided in space. Although here Superman is voiced by Mark Harmon, and he can do anything Batman can.
• Danger Mouse:
  • Unsure DM and Penfold affect this after being shot into space in "The Bad Luck Eye Of The Little Yellow God."
  • Unsure In "Gremlin Alert", after DM dispatches the anti-logic gremlin aboard his spacecraft, DM and Penfold become weightless due to lack of atmosphere and DM suddenly gropes for air.
  • OK In "The Other Day the Earth Stood Still", the villain causes Earth to lose its gravity, and all unattached objects and people float off into space. Nobody has any trouble breathing.
• Wrong - powers The ghosts in Danny Phantom don't seem to need to breathe, both Danny and Vlad in ghost form flies around in outer space without any problem. Danny and Vlad did wear a spacesuit helmet, though the latter survived the lack of air just fine without one—without the rest of the suit it would have been pretty useless. They are half-ghosts.
• OK Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: After an unsuccessful stint in the Pacific theater on an isolated island (episode "Have Plane, Will Travel"), the Vulture Squadron gets transferred again...to the moon, where they seem to do fine without any proper apparatus.
• OK In the DuckTales (1987) episode "Where No Duck Has Gone Before", Launchpad accidentally dumps himself into outer space when he opens the wrong door. Not only can he breathe, but he can also talk.
• OK DuckTales (2017): Della Duck is able to breathe on the Moon by chewing Oxy Chew (the gum that provides oxygen while you chew!) Gyro had invented. Unfortunately, it only comes in one flavor.
  "Ugh, black licorice!"
• OK Ed, Edd n Eddy has the three main characters launched into space twice. The only problem they experience is the height.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • Wrong - not real space In one episode, the main characters were floating in space with no suit and breathing. When Timmy asked how this was possible, he was told this was a TV Show. Specifically, a Show Within a Show based on Space Ghost.
  • OK In one of the Oh Yeah! Cartoons shorts, Cosmo accidentally sneezes the Turner house into space, and Timmy and his parents have no trouble breathing. This was usually averted in the show itself.
• Family Guy:
  • OK In a scene from "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story", Peter becomes an astronaut and accidentally ejects himself from his suit and into space, but has no problem breathing.
  • OK In "Blue Harvest", Peter (Han Solo) tries to fit a couch into the Millennium Falcon as he and the rest of the gang are escaping the Death Star, but it gets stuck in the access hatch. He decides to just hold onto the end of the couch on the outside of the ship until they're out of danger and is more concerned with how they're piloting.
• OK In the 1950's Felix the Cat cartoon "Venus and the Master Cylinder" (and in other cartoons in the series set in space), both Felix and Professor have no problem breathing or talking whenever they're launched into the vacuum of space, nor do they have any problems whenever they set foot on the moon.
• OK Fireball XL5: Need to breathe in space? Take an oxygen pill. No spacesuit necessary. Lasts for hours.
• OK Futurama is fine with its cast talking in space. Then again, in a series where vessels can easily travel between galaxies despite not travelling faster than light (because the speed of light was increased) and the Planet Express ship specifically travels by moving the universe around it, this isn't that unusual.
  • In Into The Wild Green Yonder the Planet Express ship crashes into a space station through a massive glass window. When it backs up and reverses out, there's nothing holding the air in place.
• OK In an episode of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, one of the Joes improvises a spacesuit out of a glass jar, some plastic trash bags, rubber bands, and determination.
• OK The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy typically plays this straight, but in "Wishbones" Rule of Funny dictates that during Skarr's wish, the statue of himself rising out of the ground under him extends in height until it reaches outside Earth's atmosphere, after which he suffocates and suffers Explosive Decompression.
• Unsure The Herculoids. Zandor and Zok, while Zok was carrying Zandor to another planet in the episode "Sarko the Arkman".
• OK The kids in Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius pull this off. There is an explanation, but Carl's singing drowns it out. When interviewed about this the animators said that they decided that spacesuits would interfere with the expressions of the characters, so that In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face.
• OK On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Beezy manages to climb to Miseryville's moon and sculpts it into a heart without the need of any kind of gear. Oddly enough, Jimmy and Lucius needed suits in an earlier episode.
• Unsure The main four from Kaeloo can do this. They spend a lot of time in space in the Season 3 premiere.
• Unsure Practically everyone in Lavender Castle is able to breathe in space.
• OK League of Super Evil: Skullosus tangles with a military guy over a cold ray, succeeds, and retreats to his space station. Shortly thereafter, the military guy, with no space-suit, pops up in the base. He got there by the helicopter hovering just outside the window, and Skullosus incredulously points out that should be impossible:
  "Helicopters in space? How does that even work?!"
  "No time to quibble over logic!"
• Unsure - zce Played straight in Legion of Super-Heroes; possibly forgivable due to the series taking place in the 30th Century and there is plenty of advanced technology available.
• OK Several Looney Tunes shorts (primarily in the The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show / The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show show the characters doing this, particularly Bugs Bunny in the Marvin the Martian Episodes, and Daffy Duck as Duck Dodgers. Even Porky Pig and Sylvester could survive in space after a flying saucer takes them into space on top of the spacecraft, having cut out underneath their campsite.
• Wrong The Magic School Bus does this in "...Gets Lost in Space", where Arnold takes off his space helmet on Pluto. The result? His head turns to ice, and the audience gets nightmares. However, the very next shot is of him sitting in the classroom, blowing his nose due to a serious cold he got. Because that's the worst thing that ever happened from taking off your helmet on Pluto.
• OK In Megas XLR, the protagonists must be able to breathe in space, because there's no way that car-head is air-tight.
• OK Mickey Mouse Clubhouse shows us that the mouse can breathe in space. Batman was SO 1939...
• OK Several installments of Mighty Mouse in all three variations (Terrytoons, Filmation, Bakshi) have the hero in space, usually on the moon where he either lives or is seen reclining.
• Wrong - powers In Milo Murphy's Law, the alien species called the Octalians are immune to the vacuum of space as long as they hold their breath and shapeshift.
• OK In the Mixels episode "Mixel Moon Madness", the Infernites and two Nixels are seen breathing perfectly fine on the Mixel Moon. Lampshaded later on:
  Naut: That dome is the only thing between us and the hideous vacuum of space!
  Flamzer: Uh, weren't we just walking around out there?
  [Naut glares at Flamzer]
  Flamzer: Sorry.
• OK Invoked and lampshaded in ¡Mucha Lucha!. One episode had the protagonists travelling to Mars, wearing nothing but their leotards:
  Rikochet: So, that whole "no air" thing?
  Buena Girl: Don't even go there.
• The New Adventures of Superman episodes.
  • OK "Prehistoric Pterodactyls". The title creatures breathe just fine while Superman was taking them unprotected through space to another planet.
  • OK "The Robot of Riga". Superman carries Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane through space unprotected while returning them to Earth from the planet Riga. The odd thing is that the episode had already established that the Rigans had spaceships (that's how Jimmy and Lois reached Riga in the first place), so it could have shown him taking them back in one.
• OK This is done in the Out of the Inkwell cartoon "A Trip to Mars", where both Max Fleischer and Koko fly off to the moon, with no oxygen masks.
• OK Phineas and Ferb tends to flip-flop depending on the situation. In "Rollercoaster", the rollercoaster car accidentally flies into space, passes over a satellite, and is ablaze during reentry, but the kids show no discomfort from lack of air, and Phineas casually remarks that they should've charged a higher admission. Conversely, in "Out To Launch", everyone is wearing space suits whenever they're outside safe environments. (The Milkshake Bar asteroid explicitly has an Earth-like atmosphere, despite its size.) Also, in "Unfair Science Fair Redux", Candace has no problem hanging out on Mars in only her regular casualwear.
• Wrong - powers PJ Masks: Anytime the characters visit the moon, the villain Luna Girl has no trouble breathing while there even without a space suit, oxygen tank etc, unlike the other characters who do need helmets. Her luna magnet grants her this ability. Later seasons introduce Motsuki, and Newton Star, who also have this power.
• Wrong - powers In The Powerpuff Girls (1998), the girls frequently end up in space for one reason or another, and have no trouble breathing, talking, shouting, or, in The Movie, hearing screams and gasps from the Earth while on an asteroid. Depending on the Writer: in one episode they did have spacesuits on.
• OK The X-Men travel to Asteroid M for The Climax of Pryde of the X-Men. One review notes, "Space was a lot different way back then. Breathing devices and spacesuits were optional."
• OK In Ready Jet Go!, Sean and Sydney, two human kids, can breathe in space, even without spacesuits with oxygen tanks.
• OK When we first see Rocky and Bullwinkle in the debut story arc "Jet Formula," they are standing on the moon with no survival apparatus. They went there to retrieve their stove (Bullwinkle: "We still owe two payments on it") which got blown up there by the first layer of a highly combustible triple-layer cake batter. The second layer got the two to the moon in a homemade rocket and the third layer brought them back.
• Wrong - powers The Bugs from Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles can walk sans spacesuits across the surface of Pluto, an asteroid, a steaming alien jungle, the deserts of a methane planet, the ocean floor off Hawaii, and the shore of same with equal ease.
• OK In the Sam & Max: Freelance Police episode "Bad Day On The Moon", Sam and Max are able to breathe on the moon (which has no atmosphere) without special equipment, Max shrugs it off by saying "I guess those prissy paranoid astronauts didn't have the spine to try it." Given that the characters reach the moon by driving there in a 1960 Desoto convertible, this is not that surprising.
  • The episode was adapted from the comic of the same name, where the line is "those candy-butt astronauts didn't have the stones to try it."
  • The ability to breathe on the moon isn't even Hand Waved for the game Bright Side of the Moon, which provides the page image.
• OK After defeating Yellow Pinky in an outer space mission, Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole accidentally blow up their spacecraft. Until headquarters can send up a vehicle to retrieve them, the two consign themselves to playing checkers while floating about in space with no breathing apparatus.
• OK In The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show short "Close Encounters Of A Strange Kind" Scooby, Scrappy, and Shaggy can breathe in space with no problem.
• Wrong - powers She-Ra: Princess of Power: In the episode "Horde Prime Takes a Holiday", She-Ra climbs an unbreakable grappling hook (that He-Man pulled out of his pants... yeah...) to Horde Prime's spaceship. Once she gets to the upper atmosphere she remarks that she's having a hard time breathing, so she turns her sword into a space helmet (don't ask, it's She-Ra). She continues the trip to the spaceship with nothing but a space helmet and her skimpy outfit. Later on though she takes the helmet off to turn it back into a sword and cut the rope.
  • One episode began with She-Ra and Swift Wind taking a leisurely flight through space without a care and another had He-Man talking and breathing with no trouble, despite being in the space between galaxies.
  • He-Man himself can breathe in space in The New Adventures of He-Man. However, the series consistently shows that, even if He-Man can breathe in space, the Galactic Guardians need at least a minimal space gear. It's never outright stated, though.
• Wrong - powers+thundercats duplicate People breathing is space is one of the less bizarre aspects of how space works in SilverHawks. SilverHawks and ThunderCats use most of the same wonky rules for space, being by the same creators. There's air, gravity, and in the case of SilverHawks, night and day by virtue of switching on a gigantic light on a schedule. Ironic, as the show pretends to educate children about astronomy and space facts. Granted, the SilverHawks are explicitly stated to be full-conversion cyborgs and Limbo to be an Alternate Universe. God only knows what the rules are there.
• OK The Simpsons:
  • Mocked relentlessly while they watch an old black and white sci-fi movie. "Space air, leaking in!" "Put on your space breathing goggles, everyone!"
  • Discussed in "Pokey Mom." While Homer is recovering from a back injury from being gored at the prison rodeo, he talks to the warden about a prisoner's painting of a unicorn in space.
    Warden: He painted a unicorn in outer space! So I'm askin' you, what's he breathin'?!
    Homer: Air.
    Warden: There's no air in space!
    Homer: There's an Air & Space museum.
• OK Space Ghost:
  • The title character, unless he's an actual ghost (and wouldn't need to breathe), but it's never been clear whether he is one or not (a possible explanation is that it's all in the suit). As lampshaded in Space Ghost Coast to Coast:
    Michael Norman: You're not sure how you became a ghost, are you really a ghost, are you sort of making this up as you go along?
    Zorak: [stifles a laugh]
    Space Ghost: I... uhh... what, you think I'm lying?
    Michael Norman: Do you require oxygen?
    Space Ghost: Um... no.
    Michael Norman: Well, then, I suppose you're not a living thing.
    Space Ghost: Um... Oh! I mean, yes! I do! I do require oxygen!
    Michael Norman: [sighs]
    Space Ghost: Um, I mean, no I don't?
    [cut to commercial]
  • Space Ghost's sidekicks Jan, Jace and Blip can also breathe in space with no problems. So can most of the alien opponents they encounter.
• Wrong - powers Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Plo Koon. Even though he has a mask, it's actually an air filter rather than a breathing device. It's explained in supplementary materials as a property of his thick Kel Dor skin. Not that weird, really, considering there are other species in Star Wars Legends that survive in vacuum through similar means (like the Givin, to name one). Curiously, Koon explains in the episode that he will be able to "endure the pressure for a short time," despite the fact that, in space, it is the LACK of pressure that he would need to endure. (Maybe he was referring to his internal pressure?)
• Wrong - powers Steven Universe, due to his half-Gem nature, can handle low-oxygen environments just fine, being able to hold conversations on the edge of Earth's atmosphere and inside special structures on the Moon. That said, thanks to his human half, he will eventually suffer if kept in that environment for a prolonged period of time, and he can still drown underwater.
• OK Used frequently in Super Friends. Actually, usually only Superman went into space without breathing equipment. Nonetheless, the other Super-Friends were able to survive with just fishbowl helmets. Oh, and Space was Noisy.
• Wrong - powers Starfire in the Teen Titans (2003) animated series is explicitly stated to be able to survive the conditions of space.
• OK ThunderCats (1985):
  • ThunderCats don't bother about breathing gear either when they venture into space. And they don't even bother handwaving it... suppose it could have to do with their magic/tech catsuits?
  • One humor fic had fun with this, with Jaga, during his long sojourn piloting the ship all alone, becomes suicidal and throws open an airlock... only to be flummoxed by discovering that ThunderCats can apparently breathe in space. (Tigra makes an editorial comment about how he hadn't noticed before, but that they can and it's really weird.)
  • Not even just the cats. Mandora may have been a gynoid, but Captain Bragg and his circus, and when he hauls the Lunattacks and Mutants to Exile Island (an asteroid with its own problems).
• Wrong - powers The Tick can breath in space, naturally.
• OK In Tiny Planets, the heroes don't seem to have trouble breathing as they zip between planets in their open-topped space craft. And in the title sequence they pass an asteroid far too small to hold an atmosphere which nevertheless has a trio of aliens living on it.
• OK In Tom and Jerry, Tom shows this ability in a few cartoons. This is a show where he can also jet through the air and come apart like a multistage rocket.
• Wrong - atmosphere In Transformers, it's kinda messy to sort it out. On one hand, Cybertron clearly has an atmosphere, because we see a huge fire erupt in the pilot, space-traveling humans have no trouble breathing there, and some Decepticons are able to control the weather by creating acid rains. However, only one episode, "War Dawn", ever shows the presence of this atmosphere visibly, indicating that either the writers weren't communicating very well with the animators (quite possible, given that the writers were American and the animation was outsourced to South Korea) or the audience was simply treated to a disproportionate number of night shots (also quite possible, given that Cybertron became a rogue planet in the aftermath of "The Ultimate Doom").
  • Some people might complain that the acid rain shown in "Divide and Conquer" is harmful to Transformers but harmless to humans. However, acid rain is a mix of EXTREMELY dilute nitric and sulfuric acids, and human skin is pretty effective at resisting weak or dilute acids. This is why humans can walk around in acid rain and not suffer anything worse than mild eye irritation. Delicate electronic circuitry is not so robust, and generally doesn't react well to rain of any kind, acidic or otherwise.
  • A shot from one of the badly-animated season 3 episodes showed Spike (a normal human) floating through space for a short while without any gear.
  • Extends to Transformers: Animated, too. When Captain Fanzone is teleported to Cybertron, he can get by just fine.
  • In Transformers: Prime, Cybertron is stated to have an atmosphere toxic to organics (this may or may not be another result of the war). Jack needs to wear a spacesuit for his trip there, and the Decepticons later threaten to expose all three human kids to it.
• Wrong - aversions and zce On Unikitty!, this has been averted twice with Dr. Fox in "Wishing Well", where she's tied to a rocket to be launched into space and exclaims that she can't breathe there, and in "Brain Trust", where she rides a rocket outside the atmosphere and begins suffocating until she activates her space helmet. The one time it's played completely straight in "Growing Pains", it gets lampshaded at the very end.
• OK On an early episode of The Venture Brothers Brock Sampson got sucked into the vacuum of space for a good 10 minutes before he was rescued. He survives fine.
• OK When the characters in VeggieTales are in space, they wear space outfits. Yet they can breathe without it (eg. Jimmy and Jerry Gourd in their debut story, Veggies in Space). This also counts for the Netflix series.
• OK Wallace & Gromit can breathe just fine on the moon in "A Grand Day Out". They don't exhibit weightlessness in outer space either. A ball Wallace kicks into the air strangely does though.
• OK The friends of Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! can breathe in space without incident.
• OK Yogi's Space Race is just one of countless examples, but Huckleberry Hound actually revels in this. He can be found on the top of his and Quack-Up's racer relaxing and trying to get a tan (Huck even mentions this in the first episode, saying that since they'll be passing "the Sun", that he wanted to take the opportunity)!
• Wrong - powers Young Justice (2010) followed JLU's lead by showing that Superman and Captain Marvel needed oxygen masks to breathe in space. Hal Jordan, John Stewart, and Guy Gardner didn't need masks, but were shown protected by the aura their power rings generated.
• OK Young Samson & Goliath episode "Moon Rendezvous". Kunev Khan flies his rocket ship to the Moon with the title characters as stowaways. After arriving, Kunev Khan, Samson and Goliath cheerfully walk around in the Moon's near-vacuum with no side effects at all. And Samson and Goliath's superpowers don't explain it: they exposed themselves to the non-existent atmosphere before they changed to their super-powered forms.

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New Example Section

Has been put on the main page.

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Spacegoing Power Examples

For a new trope where a character has an ability that lets them survive in space.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Wrong - powers In AKIRA, Tetsuo flies into space to blow up an orbital space laser. He's shown projecting an energy field around his body, presumably to protect against the vacuum of space. He also seemingly has no trouble breathing without an air supply.
  • The whole story is his journey to transcend the realm of normal physics, though, so it is not out of character for the story at that point.
• Wrong - powers In A Certain Magical Index: Miracle of Endymion, Kaori Kanzaki does not need a space suit while everybody else does. She is a Saint and therefore much tougher than an ordinary human. She was also surrounded by a magical energy field.
• Unsure - powers In Dragon Ball, Son Goku uses his power pole to drop the rabbit-like Carrot Master and his thugs off on the moon. Neither Goku making the trip or the moon bound gang members suffer any ill effects likely due to anime physics.
  • Wrong - powers Frieza's own species is strong enough to survive vacuum pressures and radiation, so they can float through space all they like.
  • Unsure - powers Also, during the fight between Bardock and Frieza, Bardock is just floating in space kicking butt (or is at least in the outer atmosphere). Despite Frieza's claim, it seems Saiyans can breathe in space, or they can channel enough energy around them to create a shield of such to trap oxygen in however temporarily.
  • Unsure - powers In Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, Beerus and Goku have a conversation and part of their fight in low Earth orbit. Beerus is a legitimate Physical God, but Goku's just this guy. Several comments that Beerus makes suggest that Goku may have permanently ascended to "god" status... or at the very least, he has kept some of the upgrades offered by the Super Saiyan God form, even though that's not supposed to happen.
• Unsure - Are mamoru and kaidou "normal"? GaoGaiGar: Guy Shishioh has survived in space without a space suit, but he was a cyborg at the time, later on, when he becomes an evoluder, he no longer needs anything to survive in space. Mamoru and Kaidou both can fly and survive for long periods in space un-aided, even while unconscious!
• Wrong - powers Nami from The Girl Who Leapt Through Space can breathe and move through space fine when her Superpowered Evil Side is around.
• Wrong - powers The highly evolved Silver Tribe in Heroic Age have this ability, as do the Nodos. Then again, the former can create matter out of nothing and the latter are giant superpowered space monsters in human form.
• Wrong - powers Kiddy Grade and Kiddy GiRL-AND have multiple examples of characters breathing in space, handwaved by the ubiquitous nanomist technology.
• Wrong - powers The final battle of Kill la Kill takes place in space. Neither of the fighters is technically human, as they are rather hybrids of human and Life Fiber, the resident alien menace, so them easily surviving the vacuum of space could be justified. Being able to talk, less so; but this being a Trigger show that basically runs on Rule of Cool it's probably better not to think too hard about it.
• Wrong - powers Kotetsu Jeeg: Shiba Hiroshi, justified because he is a cyborg. It's pointed out in the sequel Kotetsushin Jeeg, when he opens the hatch on his cockpit when they're on the moon and steps out.
  Kenji: Hey wait, there's no air out there!
  Hiroshi: I don't need it.
• Unsure In Kurau Phantom Memory, Christmas and Kurau pull this off when their space ship gets blown up.
• Macross:
  • Unsure That scarf Hikaru/Rick used early on in Super Dimension Fortress Macross/Robotech must have been some kind of awesome to have let him survive out there in space. Unless... this trope.
  • Wrong - powers The Zentraedi cannot actually breathe in space, but they're designed to have a greatly increased resistance to vacuum. Breetai gets Thrown Out the Airlock at one point, but then spends a minute or two crawling around outside the ship and jumps back in with no ill effects. In Macross Frontier, Ranka gets exposed to vacuum briefly, and is unhurt, which she chalks up to her quarter-Zentran ancestry.
  • Wrong - powers The Protodeviln from Macross 7 are all able to survive in vacuum with no protection, being genetically engineered superweapons for space combat. They also display the ability to protect others from the effects of vacuum by shielding them in some sort of energy field.
• Unsure - powers The final battle of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation takes place in low Earth orbit, and Nanoha is not only able to breath but is able to talk to her opponent. Presumably, her Barrier Jacket handles all those pesky issues like a lack of breathable atmosphere and harmful radiation.
• Unsure - powers Everyone in the Tenchi Muyo! OVAs appears to be able to breathe in space. This is probably the least strange thing about space in that series, so it doesn't stand out too much. The characters in the lower power-tier require spacesuits, but since they use hyper advanced technology, they don't look much to the part — invisible forcefields instead of helmets, and so on. Ayeka, Tenchi and Mihoshi all wear such suits early in the anime, but later Tenchi stops using his, due to realizing the power of the Light Hawk Wings. Usually handwaved by the fact that those who have any significant importance in Kajishima's canon are explicitly said to be Physical Gods and thus technically don't need to breathe.
• Wrong - powers Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Tohru has demonstrated the ability to go into orbit (or at least the upper atmosphere) without any form of space suit. It's unclear if she was using magic to protect herself.
• Unsure In Naruto The Last, Naruto's fight against Toneri on the moon definitely qualifies.
• Unsure In NG Knight Lamune & 40, the Doki-Doki Space seems to have air, which is because everyone can breathe and talk freely.
• Wrong - powers The heroes from Night Wizard can move around in the moon with no problem whatsoever, and with no need of air either. Because they're wizards.
• Wrong - powers Eneru from One Piece flew to the moon following his defeat and had no trouble walking around in just awesome pants. He is living lightning after all. That, and the One Piece 'verse has only the vaguest resemblance to Real Life physics.
• Wrong - powers One-Punch Man: Saitama was once punched to the Moon, and had no problem relaxing there briefly before jumping right back.
• Unsure - powers Near the end of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Homura gets stuck on the moon for a few minutes, and has no difficulty breathing or talking. There's no explicit explanation of how she can breathe or even how she got there, though it presumably has something to do with Madoka paradoxically destroying her own witch and rewriting the universe.
• Wrong - powers Not only can Sailor Moon breathe in space, she can even survive re-entry or rather, she and the rest of the team together can power the Silver Imperium Crystal enough to generate a heat and braking shield that just barely manages the job. Then again, she is a Magical Girl. In the manga they can just jump into orbit, breathe in space, and survive re-entry with ease.
• Unsure - powers The titular Symphogear users from Symphogear not only breathe in space but they also have no problem talking or singing there. Handwaved as a telepathy from the gears' powers.
• Wrong - powers Toward the Terra: Jomy and Soldier Blue can both breathe in space (and the initially-thin atmosphere of Naska), although this is attributed to their hyper-advanced Psychic Powers. Other Mu don't seem to have this ability.
• Wrong - powers In UQ Holder!:
  • We see several characters get put in vacuum and not die from it, including former protagonist Negi Springfield. Of course, all the characters in question are explicitly immortal, so being unable to breathe isn't exactly a showstopper for them.
  • A flashback shows a battle in the Asteroid Belt against Cosmo Entelechea, and while most of the ordinary people are wearing spacesuits, the high-level (not immortal) mages are not, suggesting there is some kind of magic that can be applied to breathe in space.
• Unsure - powers Yes! Pretty Cure 5: The Pretty Cure 5 were able to fight on the moon without any problems. Presumably they consulted Sailor Moon on proper breathing-in-space technique.
  • And then they gave those techniques to the HeartCatch Pretty Cure! girls, who also move around space fine during the Final Battle.
  • In Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure, it is stated that their pendants have magical properties even when they are not transformed, it allows the four girls to breathe in the vacuum of space and in any atmosphere, it also allows them to understand any language.

Machine Sorted Section: unchecked

Comic Books

• Wrong - powers Apollo of The Authority works this way. At one point he is asked how he operates in space, and responds that he just doesn't breathe. "Just like that?" "Well, I'd look pretty stupid if I tried to breathe in space, wouldn't I?" That's all the (non-)explanation we get.
  • And yet he can talk in space, albeit thanks to Electronic Telepathy courtesy of the Engineer.
  • Jenny Quantum doesn't need to breathe either — apparently, taking little jaunts into space to "chase the sun" is a typical father/daughter thing for ridonkulously powerful superheroes. Since she's an Energy Being in human form, it might make sense. Or not.
  • Apollo, due to the way his powers work, is directly nourished by solar energy and solar energy alone. He doesn't need to eat or breathe. He probably doesn't need to sleep either, but that doesn't stop him from sharing a bed with Midnighter.
    • For that matter, Midnighter once mentioned that he and Apollo can survive in anaerobic environments, albeit briefly. That's right; the Bat-expy can breathe in space.
• Wrong - powers Lobo can breathe, talk and smoke a cigar in space. Of course, Lobo lives and breathes Beyond the Impossible.
• Wrong - powers Empowered discovers this by accident when she steps on to an airless asteroid from a malfunctioning portal. Then again, her supersuit didn't come with instructions.
• Wrong - powers The Incredible Hulk can breathe and survive in the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - powers In Infinite Crisis, Superboy Prime jaw jacks with the entire Green Lantern Corps. In space. The Corps. are protected by their rings of course. When Earth 1 & 2 Supermen tackle Superboy Prime, they hold their breath while Prime keeps insulting them and throwing punches casually, until they throw him through the red sun of Krypton and fly him right into Mogo, a Planet that just happens to be a Green Lantern. Comics are weird.
• Wrong - powers In Invincible, any Viltrumite (plus Allen the alien) can survive in space so long as they hold their breath. Which apparently is a very long time. Long enough to cross interstellar distances without a spaceship.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • Wrong - fancy suit The Legionnaires wear "transuits", essentially skin-tight, invisible space suits that somehow provide all the protection they need. So, it just looks like they're all breathing in space. In the cartoon series, it was explained away as one of the properties of the flight rings.
  • Wrong - powers Justified in The Great Darkness Saga when a Servant of Darkness destroys a Legion Cruiser going on an interplanetary trip. White Witch casts a force protective shield spell around her and her Legion teammates to keep the oxygen and warmth in and the cold and radiation out as waiting for a rescue team.
• Wrong - powers In an issue of Marvel Star Wars Vader survives an assassination attempt via opening airlock, since he has a life-support suit; the officers who attempted the assault get sucked out instead.
• Wrong - powers The Mighty Thor plays this fast and loose. It's not specifically stated that he doesn't need to breathe, but he is shown surviving in space for short periods. The writers probably thought "He's a god, so why not? It's long since been confirmed that Thor can survive perfectly fine in space, considering he went round for round with the Phoenix Force (the entity itself, not the host) in deep space wearing nothing but his normal sparkly pants.
  • This didn't apply to Eric Masterson when he was masquerading as Thor. During The Infinity Gauntlet, Doctor Strange invokes a spell that gave everyone an hour of air. However, during combat, Eric is knocked away from his hammer and returns just short of it before he returns to being Eric and nearly suffocates before he can be restored.
  • This seems not to be a universal divine or Asgardian trait; it only applies to Loki - or at least his third incarnation - if he's actively using magic to "handle the small matter of us not explosively decompressing," per Young Avengers. His "Kid Loki" incarnation just wore a spacesuit.
• Wrong - powers In PS238, they take a class excursion to the moon. The various superkids require various levels of protection, and Captain Clarinet (the son of a Superman Captain Ersatz) has some trouble explaining that he DOES, in fact, need to breathe, and thus goes up wearing a breathing-apparatus. (He still has no trouble with the radiation, temperature, or general vacuum-ness, though.) Then Emerald Gauntlet Jr. reveals that his Gauntlet can both provide a protective force-field AND gather oxygen-atoms from the surroundings to allow him to breathe. "I'm cool that way", as he puts it. Then he winds up marooned on the moon along with a few other students, including the Evil Genius Zodon, and suggests that he could just ferry them all back to Earth with his Gauntlet... only for Zodon to explain that, while he can probably gather enough oxygen to maintain breathing on the moon (the moon's consists of approximately 40% oxygen, though most of it is bound to silicon), the same cannot be said for interplanetary space.
• Wrong - powers The Post-Crisis Captain Atom originally couldn't breathe in space, and once, when an enemy teleported him to the outer solar system, he had to fly back to Earth while holding his breath, which he could only do for a normal amount of time. Later on, though, he learned to use his powers to create and manipulate matter to keep his lungs filled with air indefinitely, so he could stay in space as long as he wanted.
• Wrong - powers Shakara: Downplayed. The Shakara were so resilient that they could withstand the vacuum of space for long stretches of time (whereas most other species will promptly explode), but apparently not indefinitely.
• Wrong - powers Superman, in the Silver Age version.
  • However, even Superman is seen using a breathing apparatus in space in early Post-Crisis comics, though he has since kicked his oxygen addiction as part of his general muscling up to near Silver Age levels.
  • Nowadays, that just means that he can hold his breath for absurd lengths of time (as can several of his spaceworthy allies, like Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman). He's still working this trope, though, when he talks in space, which he's done in a couple recent issues of JLA.
  • In the video game Justice League Heroes, Martian Manhunter reminds Superman to hold his breath in the intro to a series of levels that take place on Mars. A few levels later, Superman and Wonder Woman are fighting in the vacuum of space and talking, screaming, and fairly obviously breathing. Inconsistency much?
  • In some instances Superman has ridiculous lung capacity (due to his amazing strength being able to compress air in his lungs like an oxygen bottle). So a lot of the time Superman is simply holding his breath... then again, some of the time he's not.
  • And at one point he didn't even need to breathe altogether: during Jeph Loeb's run on Superman during the time when Brainiac 13 upgraded Metropolis. Superman was suffering from Kryptonite Poisoning induced by a nanobot, and Steel, Superboy, and Supergirl were shrunk down to go into Superman and cure him. While there, Superboy and Steel got blown into Big Blue's stomach, which was "the intestinal equivalent of a nuclear reactor! This is the man's power source... his body's splitting atoms to convert them into pure energy"! The person talking was The Prankster in Steel's hijacked armor, so his scientific knowledge of the situation may not be accurate, and this was a few origin re-tellings ago....
  • In War World both Kryptonian cousins sail the galaxy at their heart's content. Neither Clark nor Linda need to breathe due to her Kryptonian physiology. They can talk each other, though, thanks to their Super Ventriloquism (whatever it is). Martian Manhunter does not need to breathe either, and The Spectre is... well, a spirit.
  • In Supergirl Volume 2 #21 both Kryptonian cousins and Kryptonite Man fight in space. Neither of them needs to breathe.
  • As of the New 52, Kryptonians do not have to breathe, as long as their bodies have enough stored sunlight. Supergirl discovers this when she gets surprised and gasps while swimming in Supergirl vol. 6 #12.
    Supergirl: And somehow... Impossibly... I don't have to breathe. Just like I don't need to eat anymore. I don't need to sleep anymore. I should be used to impossible by now.
  • Red Daughter of Krypton Supergirl storyline provided several examples: Supergirl and Superman didn't need to breathe because they are sun-powered Kryptonians; Green and Red Lantern can survive in space because their rings' force field provides a self-recycling oxygen bubble; the Diasporan alien race can survive in the vacuum of space (that capability works against them when Supergirl notes that she can blow their ships up without killing them).
  • In Justice, Superman and Captain Marvel can survive in space without breathing — however, only Cap can talk, because he does it magically. Superman can't.
  • The main reason animals breathe is to get energy. Since Superman gets most of his energy from sunlight, it's plausible that he wouldn't need air. That being said, plants also need air to get energy, though they process it very differently, and there are entirely different reasons air might be helpful. For example, to stay cool.
• Wrong - powers In Superman: American Alien, a young and inexperienced Superman attempts to fly to the moon. He learns the hard way that while his invulnerability lets him survive a vacuum, he still needs to breathe. He almost dies before he manages to fly back to Earth.
• Wrong - powers During the Trial By Fire storyline of JLA, Firestorm finds himself out on the moon, breathing normally. Then, he is attacked and transformed back into Ronnie Raymond. He is immediately unable to breathe or function, and it is only Flash's assistance that saves him.
• Wrong - powers Ultimate Vision: Vision and Dima are both artificial beings, so of course they can survive the vacuum of space and simply leave the doomed satellite.
• Wrong - powers In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan doesn't need to breathe, and momentarily forgets that ordinary humans do, he then provides Silk Spectre with a Legion style invisible forcefield. Mars is only slightly more human friendly than space.
• Wrong - powers Wonder Woman (1942): Speaking of Wonder Woman, her Silver Age version had earrings to provide life support in space by creating a "transparent envelope" (apparently "bubble" was too undescriptive). Since she was also sculpted from clay and brought to life through magic it is entirely possible she does in fact not need oxygen to survive.
• Wrong - powers In X-Men: What If Stryfe Killed Apocalypse, (somewhat before Fatal Attractions, set during the events of X-Cutioner's Song) it is demonstrated that vacuum is one of the things which will, in fact, kill Wolverine. If that were to happen today, he'd barely blink an eye...
  • OK Speaking of X-Cutioner's Song, there's one scene where Cyclops and Jean Grey escape one of Stryfe's fortresses and attempt to get away by crawling across the moon. Not only do they survive that brief point of time before they pass out. That's also counting the fact that there's also probably enough gravity that Jean can take a misstep and promptly faceplant onto the moon's surface and get a bloody nose.

Fan Works

• Wrong - powers In Bringer of Death both Cooler (Frieza's brother, and as such has this ability) and Cell try and take advantage of this against Vegeta, only to learn that Vegeta expected this and had put together a method to store oxygen in his lungs, with his Super Saiyan aura taking care of the other problems.
• Wrong - powers In Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Supergirl fanfic The Vampire of Steel, Supergirl flies out of the atmosphere to get rid of an Eldritch Abomination. Being Kryptonian, the space vacuum is not trouble at all.
• Wrong - powers Child of the Storm has Asgardians and Kryptonians, who have no trouble surviving in space. As Harry's Asgardian heritage comes through, he is seen more than once hanging out in the upper atmosphere or space without any protective gear - though part of that might be his use of telekinesis.
• Wrong - powers Sonic the Hedgehog's canon ability to breathe in space is justified in Descent into Darkness as being a trait of dokan. They absorb, and use, oxygen more efficiently than humans.
• Wrong - powers In Here There Be Monsters, the various entities empowering the Marvel family or villains like Ibac and Sabbac grant their chosen ones the ability to survive with no atmosphere.
  Ibac was somewhat reassured when he found that the vacuum and cold of space could be resisted by calling on his powers, plus the shield that Sabbac had given him.
• Wrong - powers Last Child of Krypton: In this crossover Shinji thinks maybe he can breathe in space… sometimes he jokes about it… and later he confirms he can, indeed. Because he is Superman.
  Shinji: Hi, I'm Shinji Ikari, and I can breathe in space?
• Wrong - powers The same goes for another Kryptonian character in The Last Daughter, where Taylor Hebert becomes Superwoman.
• Unsure - powers Discussed in Man of Steel story Daughter of Fire and Steel. When the Black Zero crew arrives in Earth, they test the planet's atmosphere before going out of their ship to ascertain whether its air is safe to breathe.
• Wrong - powers In Power Girl fanfic A Force of Four Kryptonians and Hatorians don’t need to breathe. It becomes a plot point when the four villains have to relocate their Earthborn prisoners but can't move them to a place with no atmosphere.
  The atmosphere was not like that of Earth or Krypton. It was mainly carbon dioxide, at a pressure of about .15 psi, as opposed to 14.7 psi on Terra and a slightly greater density on their homeworld. Their voices sounded strange to themselves when they spoke. But the air's differing composition meant nothing to them. They could breathe almost anything, or nothing at all.
• Wrong - powers In Supergirl fanfic Hellsister Trilogy, the Legionnaires can breathe in space thanks to their Flight Rings -and some of them like Supergirl because of their natural powers- but they still need additional devices to communicate with each other. Supergirl's ability to exist out of the boundaries of a planet comes up when she arrives in the 31st century.
  When she had slowed enough, Supergirl simply winked out of warp-time and found herself back in orbital space. Her lungs automatically tried to breathe, found vacuum, and ceased action. Kara willed them subconsciously to retain what oxygen they contained.
• Wrong - powers Invoked in Supergirl (2015) story Survivors. Before getting out of her rocket Kara is worried about the alien atmosphere being breathable. She dares take a breath and confirms she can breathe in that atmosphere.
• Wrong - powers In Superman story Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation Superman's Home Base is located within the asteroid Ceres. Superman can reach it because he doesn't need to breathe. He doesn't like the reminder, though, because it makes him feel less human.
  He had little taste for space, actually. The lack of sound was a major sensory deprivation. He could always attune his super-hearing to take in noises from Earth or other planets, and often he did. But it never kept back the knowledge that the spaces between worlds were not intended for human life, not even such as his.
  Krypts could survive there. Because Krypts were freaks.

Films - Live Action

• Wrong - powers The Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise are capable of surviving in the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - powers Gamera can breathe in space as well... he can fly too...
  • This essay describes the biology of Kaiju, such as how they can move, fly and Breathe In Space.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • OK Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) apparently operates by the principle that you can't breathe in space, but if you have some kind of respirator, you need no other protection from the elements. Peter Quill flies from the Kyln to the other Guardians in the Milano in nothing but his civilian clothes and his mask, which doesn't even cover his hair. Similarly, Peter later saves Gamora's life by coming out of his mining pod in space and giving her his mask, holding his breath long enough for The Cavalry — in the form of his space pirate adopted family — to come and get both of them. Neither suffer particularly ill effects given that they both spend about a minute in vacuum.
  • Wrong - powers Avengers: Infinity War: The Guardians are shocked to discover Thor floating in space, alive after having spent who knows how long in the vacuum without any protection. He's near death, but only due to injuries he received before being spaced. Later in the movie, he deliberately goes out without a space suit, and is none the worse for wear. He can even speak and pant in space, somehow.
  • Wrong - powers In Captain Marvel, this is one of Carol's many powers.
• Wrong - powers In Men in Black 3 the antagonist Boris the Animal is a member of the boglodite alien species, and is able to survive in the vacuum of space, as shown in the movie's opening in which he escapes from a prison on the Moon by blasting a hole through a wall causing a huge decompression that kills everyone else.
• Wrong - powers In Star Trek: First Contact, Borg drones stroll across the hull of the Enterprise without environmental suits. Presumably, their internal replicators (mentioned in series episode "I, Borg") supply them with whatever gases they need. Perhaps whatever turns their skin gray also maintains their internal pressure.
  • Given that the Borg don't need to eat it's entirely possible that they don't need to breathe. It's also possible forcefield trickery is at play, or those drones seen working on the Enterprise hull have been specifically modified to function in a vacuum.
• Superman:
  • Wrong - powers During Superman II, Zod, Ursa and Non (well, him, not so much) had a lengthy conversation with each other about taking over the world whilst on the moon. As well as talking to an astronaut. Even if they could talk in space, he shouldn't be able to hear them through his air-tight helmet.
  • OK Abused in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace:
    • Superman talks in space. Nuclear Man uses his super-breath in space. To freeze Superman. Lacy screams in space. And by that point, the brain melts, if it hadn't already from everything else wrong with that film.
    • And in a deleted scene, he takes the boy who wrote to him saying he should destroy all of Earth's nuclear weapons for a flight around the Earth, without a spacesuit. At least in the comic book adaptation he gives him one.
    • Hilariously, at the end of the film, after defeating Nuclear-Man and Luthor asks him how he did it, Superman begins his answer with the words "High school physics..."
  • Wrong In Man of Steel, Superman briefly flies outside of Earth's atmosphere, despite the movie establishing that he needs to breathe. Although he might have been holding his breath.

Literature

• Wrong - powers Reginald Martin (under the pen-name E.C.Elliot) wrote a series of fourteen juvenile SF books featuring protagonist Kemlo and his friends, the "spaceborn". Merely by being born on an orbital space station, they gained the power to "breathe" in space, and needed to wear protective suits to enter an atmosphere.
• Wrong - powers In the Animorphs series, it's revealed that Andalites do not require space suits, instead simply wearing masks with a breathable gas that prevents decompression. It's... considerably less efficient for humans, and merely draws out the process of suffocation in space.
• Wrong - powers In Book of the Short Sun, the alien Inhumi are supposedly able to fly unaided and unprotected between planets. It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide whether this is actually possible, even in-universe.
• Wrong - powers In Dad, Are You the Tooth Fairy?, Gabi's dad claims that there used to be magical creatures, but they had to leave "because of technology", and that they may have escaped to "the stars" or be living on the moon now.
• Wrong - powers Diane Duane's Door into Shadow depicts dragons who are able to fly light-years through space without breathing.
• Wrong - powers In John Varley's Eight Worlds books and stories, wherein humanity has been driven from the Earth by enigmatic aliens and is forced to live on the other worlds of the Solar System, humans are often fitted with a portable force-field generator which operates automatically when they walk from pressurised to unpressurised areas. The force-fields merge when brought together so that people can embrace and make love in vacuum. Meanwhile, in the rings of Saturn, the Symbs are humans who live in symbiosis with biological, semi-sentient spacesuits. They spend their entire lives in vacuum, the symbiots providing them with all the oxygen they need and recycling their waste for nutrition via photosynthesis.
• Wrong - powers In the Fairy Oak series, Telli has been able to see the stars up close without a spacesuit (as these don't exist). Partly justified, as she is a fairy.
• Wrong - powers Peter F. Hamilton's Fallen Dragon has some people encounter immense creatures engineered to serve as a kind of galactic library. They orbit red giant stars and live off the radiation and the matter in the solar wind.
• Wrong - powers Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka has the Oswaft, aliens who evolved in space and were perfectly happy there, absorbing enough loose atoms in a nebula to grow bigger than aircraft carriers. They could even do hyperspace jumps.
• Wrong - powers Sergei Pavlov's Moon Rainbow series feature some humans who entered into a symbiotic relationship with a (non-sentient) race of living Nanomachines, which apparently could do an instant and reversible matter-energy conversion on the whim, and thus acquired a whole bunch of cool super powers. One of these powers was that they didn't actually need to breathe anymore, as the symbiotes would supply required oxygen directly into the cells through the energy-matter conversion.
  But convincing one's own body that it doesn't need to do one of its most important functions was another matter entirely. One of the main characters used up all his oxygen (it's a long story) and ended up suffering an extremely frustrating and futile desire to breathe... for a good six hours after his last bottle died. Though, he was still new to his powers yet.
• Wrong - powers In My Brother is a Superhero, this turns out to be the intended purpose of Zack's Super Not-Drowning Skills.
• Wrong - aversion/powers In Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, Kostya assumes that, being a very powerful vampire, he should be able to survive in space long enough to teleport to a space station and proceed with his plan. He's wrong. Due to how magic works in the setting, there's no magic in space.
• Wrong - powers In The Pride of Parahumans parahumans can survive without air for about an hour, ten minutes conscious. And they can function in vacuum with nothing more than a helmet for a long time. Their eardrums are still vulnerable to Explosive Decompression though.
• Wrong - powers In Donald Moffitt's Second Genesis, the "cuddlies" have evolved to survive in space for extended periods. They have adaptations such as extra lungs, nictitating membranes across the eyes, sealable nostrils, and the ability to supersaturate their cells with oxygen like whales. Presumably they also have toughened skin and bodies to prevent the pressure in their own bodies from rupturing its way out.
• Wrong - powers In Star Wars Legends, the Givin race evolved on a world whose wacky lunar orbits regularly robbed areas of atmosphere. As a result the Givin developed an exoskeleton that doubles as a spacesuit. The Force Did It.
• Unsure - powers Spider Robinson's Stardance novels wind up with humanity dividing into air-breathers and space-farers, through the consumption of some reddish gunk found in Titan's atmosphere. The spacers can live quite normally in vacuum with their biological symbiote/suits.
• Wrong - powers In a novel from Star Trek: The Lost Era, a Neyel transported aboard a ship after being blown out into space isn't quite dead after all; it turns out Neyel have engineered themselves to survive vacuum for a time. As is pointed out, they're not the only race who can survive space; mention is made of the Nasat, a nod to Starfleet Corps of Engineers.
• Wrong - powers H. P. Lovecraft's work features not one, but three alien species, not counting the famed Cthulhu himself, who are capable of flying through space completely naked. Cthulhu, the Byakhee and the Mi-Go may get a pass, since they're explicitly said to be extradimensional beings made of exotic matter, but the Starfish Aliens known as the Elder Things are not. It is explained that they "absorbed certain chemicals" in preparation for their journey through space, though at least on Earth the required knowledge was later lost.

Live Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • Wrong - powers It is established that due to their alien biology, Time Lords such as the Doctor can survive in the vacuum of space without the need for external protection.
    • However, while Time Lords do not need space suits, they still need oxygen to breathe. There was one notable instance in which the Fifth Doctor had to go outside a ship into the vacuum of space, but all he took with him was an oxygen tank from a medical kit. Other episodes establish that Time Lords have a "respiratory bypass", which allows them to survive being strangled. It's not clear if this means a Time Lord can survive for even longer periods in space, although they would be unconscious (whereas the Fifth Doctor needed to repair something on the outside of the ship so he had to stay conscious, so he took oxygen with him).
    • In "Oxygen", the Doctor survives a spacewalk helmetless, after he had to give his helmet to Bill because her suit was malfunctioning. The surviving miners don't know how he did it. But he doesn't survive unscathed — he gets blinded due to lack of oxygen, it not being clear exactly how long they were outside.
  • OK Not in space, mind you, but close: in "Terror of the Zygons", the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane are trapped in a hyperbaric chamber being drained of oxygen. He puts Sarah into a trance, telling her she does not need to breathe, then puts himself into one until they are rescued.
  • Unsure In "Nightmare of Eden", the Fourth Doctor puts himself in a hypnotic trance to survive a shuttle trip without benefit of oxygen.
  • Wrong Taken to heavy levels in "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe", where the Eleventh Doctor can not only breathe, but can talk in space without the need of a spacesuit or space helmet (He still needs a spacesuit, as he falls to Earth afterwards). Possibly the ship's artificial atmosphere was still functioning, though it's not mentioned.
  • OK "The Rings of Akhaten" is the most insane example in the new series. Everyone is going around in a planetary ring system that appears to be open to the vacuum of space. The only explanation is that there's probably some kind of atmospheric shell — but this is not brought up in the episode.
  • Wrong - powers "The Tsuranga Conundrum": The Pting doesn't breathe oxygen, and is unaffected by the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - powers For the most part, Farscape manages to avoid this trope, the exception being D'Argo. Apparently Luxans can survive unprotected in space for "a quarter-arn", and in the miniseries he uses this ability to keep someone else alive longer than they normally could have.
  • OK In the mini-arc "Look At The Princess", John Crichton manages to hold his breath long enough to float from one craft to another. Even though the air pressure will rupture your lungs, that's why you don't hold your breath in a vacuum, though that's the least of that scene's problems with science . . .
• Wrong - powers Becomes a plot point in Kamen Rider Fourze The Movie where Gentaro finally realizes that his dream girl Nadeshiko isn't human.
  • This happens again in #47 with Kengo Utahoshi, which is used in his reveal that he was born from the Core Switch.
• OK Lexx gives its human characters spacesuits consisting of... a helmet with a plastic visor covering the eyes. That's all. But it it's all part of the charm.
  • Wrong - powers Kai justifiably doesn't wear one because he is undead and has no need for breathing or life support. He strolls around outer space in his normal outfit.
• Wrong - powers The Martian Manhunter on Smallville not only can survive in space, being in Earth's atmosphere actually inhibits his Healing Factor. Well, he is from Mars; air's a lot less thick and oxygenated over there.
• Unsure - powers In the Ultra Series, it seems that pretty much every non-human character is capable of breathing in space. Ultras regularly fly back and forth through space between Earth and M78, kaiju fly through space or are carried out of Earth's atmosphere without any trouble, and even the aliens who do get about using spacecraft are still able to fight the Ultras in space.

Tabletop Games

• Wrong - powers In Eclipse Phase any morph with the "Vacuum Sealing" augmentation can survive in space, so long as they have air.
• Wrong - powers This can be simulated in games that feature superpowers. GURPS can simulate it nicely with enough points. It's even (relatively) cheaper in Mutants & Masterminds, being somewhat in-genre.
• Wrong - powers Old World of Darkness:
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse features a type of shapeshifting wererats known as the Munchmausen Ratkin who, in addition to ignoring temperatures of absolute zero or burning hot lava, don't suffocate in a vacuum. It's heavily implied that they can do this because they're batshit insane.
  • In Mage: The Ascension, mages could breathe in space. Technocracy mages could not, since they were committed to a worldview (!) that included "no air in space". (One sourcebook recommends recruiting any Technocracy mage who can breathe in space, because they're clearly rejecting Technocracy views or they'd die trying this.)
• Wrong - powers Starfinder: Star Shamans start the game with the ability to breathe in space and immunity to other unpleasant effects of vacuum exposure.
• Wrong - powers Vampire: The Requiem notes that vampires technically can breathe in space. Then again, isn't the inability and lack of need to breathe, regardless of environment, one of the key qualities in defining a vampire?
• Wrong - powers Warhammer 40,000:
  • Space Marines can survive in space even without their Powered Armor for a prolonged periods of time. They're two metres tall Super Soldiers with bulletproof chests and can survive on a healthy diet of concrete and metal, so this doesn't receive much attention. They achieve this by holding their breath for quite some time, having specific adaptations that can create a hardened layer over the skin as a sort of organic vacuum suit and the ability to voluntarily enter a sort of deep coma with a metabolic rate near zero.
  • Primarchs. During the Battle of Calth, Roboute Guilliman was blown into space where he spent hours clinging to the spaceship hull. After that he still had enough strength left in him to find some Word Bearers and punch their heads off. With just his fists, not a powerfist, while still in space and despite Word Bearers being in power armor.
  • Ordo Xenos inquisitor Amberley Vail mentioned that Genestealers can keep operating in vacuum for surprisingly large amounts of time. Vacuum does kill Genestealers eventually, but quite a lot of people were ambushed in void by them.

Video Games

• Wrong - powers Breathing in space is no problem for the deities of Asura's Wrath. Same with The Gohma, or (Evil) Ryu and Akuma in the DLC. Their loose clothing flaps in Dramatic Wind with no care for the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - powers Beatrix from Battleborn is capable of breathing in space. During Phoebe's DLC Story Operation, Beatrix mentions that in response to her tranquilizing and attempting to perform a "completely routine" brainstem biopsy on Attikus, the Thrall threw her out of an airlock. She however survived the vacuum of space as she had replaced her lungs long ago.
• Unsure - powers The final chapter of Bayonetta takes place in deep space, where Jeanne rescues Bayonetta by hitching a ride on a rocket with her Badass Bike, and the latter fights a frigging god that she was trapped in. No mention is made on how Bayonetta and Jeanne can survive hard vacuum, but being that they are WITCHES, well...
• Wrong - powers Lampshaded in Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten: During the penultimate chapter, the protagonists go to the moon to stop the Big Bad's plans of destroying the world. Fuka, the only human in the group, immediately notices that she can breathe normally. Fenrich explains that angels and demons don't need oxygen, neither does Fuka, because she's technically dead.
• OK Played for laughs in Double Dragon Neon. While on a rocket powered ten floor pagoda, Billy and Jimmy only need to hold their breath to go outside the space ship. During those sections you can visibly see their cheeks are puffed out.
  Billy: We'd better hold our breath, this is a hard vacuum.
  Jimmy: Good idea, bro!
• Wrong - powers In Kid Icarus: Uprising, everyone can breathe in space with no problem. Then again, that's probably the least unrealistic (and most consistent) aspect of space in that game, plus we don't see any mortals from Earth up there, just demons, space pirates, and an angel or two. Pit has to hold his breath underwater, but only Earth's water, not in the liquid flowing through Celestial Sea where he fights Space Pirates(no, there isn't actually a sea in space but there is a creek to splash around in said sea region).
• OK - straight+powers In MDK2, the invading aliens apparently have no trouble working in vacuum without any protective gear or having large outdoor areas on their orbiter. This orbiter is apparently keeping all that air inside a forcefield because when Doctor Hawkins opens the airlock on his own spaceship Jim Dandy, all the air in the Unnecessarily Large Interior gets promptly blown out through it, including Hawkins himself if he doesn't find a way to pin himself to the floor. Even then he is in danger of suffocating... unless he puts on a fishbowl, which doesn't even fit tightly to his neck.
• Wrong - powers One of the three possible final stages of Shippu Mahou Daisakusen is Kobold Tower, a tower so high it reaches into space. While most characters are in ships that can be presumed to be pressurized, several characters such as Miyamoto the dragon and Nirvana the fairy are clearly exposed to the vacuum of space, which seems to have absolutely no bearing on them whatsoever.
• Mass Effect:
  • OK In Mass Effect, every squad member wears a completely sealed helmet in any remotely hazardous location, including ones without any atmosphere. Mass Effect 2 lets this slide; half the team wears nothing more than a breath mask in hard vacuum (only Tali and Garrus wear complete spacesuits, even if Garrus' has a damaged collar). Special mention to Jack, who goes about in her usual Stripperiffic outfit and a breath mask.
  • first half wrong, second half OK In Mass Effect 3, DLC squadmate Javik doesn't wear so much as an oxygen mask in vacuum. Apparently, Protheans really can breathe in space. This is also the result of certain DLC looks for squaddies — Ashley and James can apparently survive with just a visor or headset.
  • Wrong - powers According to the Codex for Mass Effect: Andromeda, the kett (or at least kett Chosen) can temporarily survive in the vacuum of space.
• Wrong - powers In Metroid Prime, not only can Ridley breathe in space, he can fly in space by flapping his wings. This is easily hand waved by the fact that at this point, Ridley is more machine than dragon. His wings are made of force field and the flapping can be chalked up to muscle memory. What isn't so easily hand waved is how a seemingly non cybernetic Ridley was able to fly from the Ceres Research station to planet Zebes in Super Metroid. Oddly enough, in Metroid Zero Mission he does fly a spaceship to the surface of Zebes.
• Wrong - powers At the end of Persona 3, the main character's Universe Persona allows him to levitate unaided into outer space for the final battle. Then again, he makes the trip from Earth to the core of Nyx's embodiment (the Moon) in just a minute or two from everyone's perspective, so some sort of metaphysical transportation might be involved. Whichever the reason is, it is presumably why he doesn't need a spacesuit.
• OK Ratchet from Ratchet & Clank can survive wearing no protection on baby planets that logically shouldn't hold any atmosphere. He did gain an O2 helmet in the first game and presumably still has it — not that they alter his model to include it in any of the subsequent games. The mask still leaves his upper face and tail exposed to hard vacuum with no ill effects.
  • Wrong - powers Curiously, in the Gemlik Base level in the first game, Captain Qwark is inexplicably able to breathe and talk in the open vacuum of space when confronting Ratchet, who needed an O2 mask just to transverse the level. This is odd considering Up Your Arsenal had him bragging about how he spent six days clinging to Dr. Nefarious' spaceship, while holding his breath the whole trip.
  • Unsure In Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, Ratchet has a helmet with a visor that normally only covers his eyes, but it extends to cover his whole face and a rebreather appears automatically upon Ratchet entering a vacuum, diving underwater, or entering certain toxic atmospheres. There are still some baby planets where the rebreather doesn't activate, but these worlds also tend to have plants and animals that are apparently doing just fine out there, so this trope may still be in effect.
    • Plus in the Future games, the O2 mask was changed from a full helmet to a small face mask.
• Unsure - powers In Rodina, the xenos can be found patrolling airless asteroids wearing armour which seemingly covers their torsos and backs of the heads, but leaves faces and limbs exposed to environment.
• OK Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • It varies in the games; most stages set in space don't have a problem with breathing, but there are some exceptions, especially any stage where only Super forms are permitted. Whether the need for Super Mode is due to problems breathing or need for the power of hovering/flight generally granted by such forms can be somewhat unclear. It may be possible that the other space station-based stages have artificial atmosphere. Strangely, even though they can survive in a vacuum, Sonic and co. can still drown if they stay underwater for too long.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, even though characters can get sucked out of the space station through broken windows, none of them have any trouble breathing in the vacuum when they venture outside.
• Wrong - powers While Terrans in Starcraft all wear heavy powered armor that doubles as an environment suit, zerg and protoss foot-soldiers seem to have no problems whatsoever operating in the vacuum of space without protective gear. While the manual handwaves this for the zerg as the result of their having assimilated a spaceborne race in the backstory, there's no explanation for why the protoss can breathe in space. They may not need to as they don't have any recognizable mouth or nostrils through which to breathe anyway. A close look at the victory screen when playing as protoss reveals what appears to be a respirator, as well. Their shields may also play a part. It's since been shown that the protoss are photosynthetic, they only need light to survive.
• Super Robot Wars series:
  • Wrong According to Mazinger Z, the Boss Borot has an open-air cockpit. But when Mazinger Z appears in Super Robot Wars, the Boss Borot can be deployed in space just fine without apparent modifications (it will perform like due to having a terrible rating for space combat, but in both Mazinger Z and Super Robot Wars the Boss Borot is a Joke Character anyways). This actually has a justification: any mech (not just Borot) that isn't airtight simply has the pilot wear a spacesuit.
  • Wrong - powers Also, Rom Stoll can talk in space as he does his lectures. However, he's a robot.
  • Unsure Whenever Yoko uses her sniper rifle attack of the Yoko M Tank on outer space terrain in Super Robot Wars Z2.
  • OK In Super Robot Wars V, Ange somehow can fire her machine gun out of her cockpit in space.
  • OK In Super Robot Wars X, Wataru exits Ryuoumaru in his final attack. This can be done even in outer space.
• Wrong - powers Xenosaga has chaos able to survive in space (for an unspecified amount of time) and talk too. He's the personification of Anima and (the power behind) Jesus and spends the first nine-tenths of the plot sandbagging so hard.
• Wrong - powers They can't exactly breathe in space, but according to the X-Universe's X-Encyclopedia the Paranid can survive unprotected in hard vacuum for about forty minutes on average.

Webcomics

• Wrong - powers The president from the Galaga comic can breathe in space due to wizardry. He's also immune to Explosive Decompression.
• Wrong - powers In A Miracle of Science, Captain Quevillion can breathe in space thanks to Sufficiently Advanced technology that holds a layer of air around her body. Fairly consistent technobabble is offered to justify this.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja:
  • Wrong - powers Ron Wizard can fly in space unprotected because he's a wizard.
  • Wrong - powers Sparklelord too. (Alt Text: "The unicorn does not need to worry about oxygen or pressure. He is a magical unicorn.")
• Wrong - powers Turns out that Mab from Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures can breathe on the moon — what with the Fae being a race of Reality Warpers who run on Rule of Crazy, it's not really that surprising. The really interesting part here is that Pyroduck (who is a dragon) is wearing a spacesuit, which indicates that dragons (who are otherwise considered nearly as powerful as the Fae) CAN'T breathe in space. And also that Furrae apparently has some sort of space-program.
• Wrong - powers Sluggy Freelance:
  • Aylee's species doesn't need to breathe and was originally found in the vacuum of space. When she forgets that humans do need to breathe, Hilarity Ensues.
  • Lodoze, a parody of Lobo, can apparently breathe in space because he's so tough. (Although, as Bun-bun puts it shortly before making short work of him, it's easy to be "tough" when you're completely invulnerable.)
• Wrong - powers Star Mares, being a Fusion Fic of Star Wars and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, features fighter pegasi who, while dressed like X-Wing and TIE Fighter pilots, can fly through space and fight without their fighter craft, with exposed wings, tails, and partially exposed heads. Rebels have the standard pilot helmet, while Imperials only have goggles over their eyes instead of the TIE Pilot helmet. Both do have gas masks over their muzzles to breathe, though, and other ponies do require full space suits. Rainbow Dash, however, plays it completely straight, not requiring any such equipment to survive in space.
• Wrong - powers Star Power: This is a standard power for the Star Powered Sentinels. Danica can even talk in space without issue.
• Wrong - powers Terinu: Terinu freaks his companions when he demonstrates this ability in an early issue of the comic. All There in the Manual explains that since his race was designed to be used as power sources on ships, they were designed with extreme survival measures in mind, with special mucous filling their lungs and nasal passages and forming a transparent shell over their eyes to prevent damage, and using their Bion abilities to provide energy to their bodies in lieu of blood oxygen.
• Wrong - powers The titular character of Vexxarr frequently makes space walks (or whatever his species does) with no more protection than a sweater. Apparently Bleen only need to breathe once a week or so, like eating. There's also the "rock crabs" who live in space and their silicoid predators.

Web Original

• Unsure - powers It turns out that Tennyo from the Whateley Universe can fly through space, because she just doesn't need to breathe. Or other stuff. And, based on her DNA, she's not anything close to human.

Western Animation

• OK Played straight with almost all the superheroes and villains in Atomic Puppet, including the title Kid Hero. The only exception is Mookie, but even then, the only thing he ever needs is the helmet (usually a makeshift glass bowl!). However, given Mookie has no powers unlike every other superhero or supervillain, the show's basic underlining seems to be that having superpowers automatically allows one to breathe in space.
• Wrong - powers Avengers Assemble: One episode had Thor and the Hulk getting yelled at for breaking things by wrestling for fun in Avengers Tower, so they decided to finish their match on the Moon where they would not be disturbing the other Avengers.
• Wrong - powers The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: During a mission into outer space which Tony uses as an excuse to build custom spacesuits for every member of the team, the Hulk's suit consists entirely of a new pair of shorts and an oxygen mask hooked up to an air supply on his back. At the same time, Thor's spacesuit seems to be a suit of platemail armor with no faceguard on the helmet, leaving his face completely uncovered.
• Ben 10:
  • OK This was done in Alien Force. However since they were with a 100,000+ year old scientist that walked through time like it was nothing, they didn't bother to try to explain it. The so-crazy-he's-supersane scientist ignored the question.
    "What, how are we even breathing?"
    "An excellent question, but not even remotely the point."
  • Wrong - powers Ben 10 also features several alien species which can survive just fine in space, one of which Ben transformed into in order to continue fighting. In fact, it appears to be that everything can breathe in space except humans, since every time he's been in space his alien forms have been able to breathe.
  • OK Lampshaded in an episode of Ben 10: Omniverse, where after boarding a derelict spaceship Ben takes off his helmet without bothering to check whether there's still atmosphere. His new partner Rook asks how he knew it would be okay, and Ben just responds that it's never been a problem in the past.
• In the DC Animated Universe (particularly Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League), there is a general consensus that even metahumans can't breathe without oxygen — even Superman uses a Space suit or at least breathing gear. There are, however, a few exceptions.
  • Unsure Batman has snuck onto the Watchtower without the use of teleporters or shuttles, when it was in orbit. That's just how Batman rolls. He could be behind you right now.
  • Wrong - powers Lobo rides a rocket motorcycle through space without life support. He can also talk in space unaided, something no-one else in the DCAU can do.
  • Wrong - powers During the episode "The Return", a wave of superheroes attempts to stop Amazo before he enters orbit. Of them, only Superman needed special gear. Green Lantern gets a pass because his ring generates life support. S.T.R.I.P.E. does wear a suit of Powered Armor, so it's probably self-contained. Captain Atom is composed of pure energy and doesn't need to breathe. Orion's flight-rig can generate atmosphere. Starman isn't human. The only weird one in that mix was Dr. Light, who somehow copied GL's trick.
• Wrong - powers The ghosts in Danny Phantom don't seem to need to breathe, both Danny and Vlad in ghost form flies around in outer space without any problem. Danny and Vlad did wear a spacesuit helmet, though the latter survived the lack of air just fine without one—without the rest of the suit it would have been pretty useless. They are half-ghosts.
• Wrong - powers The rule appears to have been revoked for Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (which is near enough to a DCAU story that it fits here), as Superman is shown in the first scenes flying unaided in space. Although here Superman is voiced by Mark Harmon, and he can do anything Batman can.
• Wrong - powers In Milo Murphy's Law, the alien species called the Octalians are immune to the vacuum of space as long as they hold their breath and shapeshift.
• Wrong - powers PJ Masks: Anytime the characters visit the moon, the villain Luna Girl has no trouble breathing while there even without a space suit, oxygen tank etc, unlike the other characters who do need helmets. Her luna magnet grants her this ability. Later seasons introduce Motsuki, and Newton Star, who also have this power.
• Wrong - powers In The Powerpuff Girls (1998), the girls frequently end up in space for one reason or another, and have no trouble breathing, talking, shouting, or, in The Movie, hearing screams and gasps from the Earth while on an asteroid. Depending on the Writer: in one episode they did have spacesuits on.
• Wrong - powers The Bugs from Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles can walk sans spacesuits across the surface of Pluto, an asteroid, a steaming alien jungle, the deserts of a methane planet, the ocean floor off Hawaii, and the shore of same with equal ease.
• Wrong - powers She-Ra: Princess of Power: In the episode "Horde Prime Takes a Holiday", She-Ra climbs an unbreakable grappling hook (that He-Man pulled out of his pants... yeah...) to Horde Prime's spaceship. Once she gets to the upper atmosphere she remarks that she's having a hard time breathing, so she turns her sword into a space helmet (don't ask, it's She-Ra). She continues the trip to the spaceship with nothing but a space helmet and her skimpy outfit. Later on though she takes the helmet off to turn it back into a sword and cut the rope.
  • One episode began with She-Ra and Swift Wind taking a leisurely flight through space without a care and another had He-Man talking and breathing with no trouble, despite being in the space between galaxies.
  • He-Man himself can breathe in space in The New Adventures of He-Man. However, the series consistently shows that, even if He-Man can breathe in space, the Galactic Guardians need at least a minimal space gear. It's never outright stated, though.
• Wrong - powers Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Plo Koon. Even though he has a mask, it's actually an air filter rather than a breathing device. It's explained in supplementary materials as a property of his thick Kel Dor skin. Not that weird, really, considering there are other species in Star Wars Legends that survive in vacuum through similar means (like the Givin, to name one). Curiously, Koon explains in the episode that he will be able to "endure the pressure for a short time," despite the fact that, in space, it is the LACK of pressure that he would need to endure. (Maybe he was referring to his internal pressure?)
• Wrong - powers Steven Universe, due to his half-Gem nature, can handle low-oxygen environments just fine, being able to hold conversations on the edge of Earth's atmosphere and inside special structures on the Moon. That said, thanks to his human half, he will eventually suffer if kept in that environment for a prolonged period of time, and he can still drown underwater.
• Wrong - powers An especially funny moment in Superman: The Animated Series has Bizarro flying into space only to begin suffocating a few hundred kilometres out, forgetting that Bizarro needs oxygen badly.
• Wrong - powers Starfire in the Teen Titans (2003) animated series is explicitly stated to be able to survive the conditions of space.
• Wrong - powers The Tick can breath in space, naturally.
• Wrong - powers Young Justice (2010) followed JLU's lead by showing that Superman and Captain Marvel needed oxygen masks to breathe in space. Hal Jordan, John Stewart, and Guy Gardner didn't need masks, but were shown protected by the aura their power rings generated.
• OK Young Samson & Goliath episode "Moon Rendezvous". Kunev Khan flies his rocket ship to the Moon with the title characters as stowaways. After arriving, Kunev Khan, Samson and Goliath cheerfully walk around in the Moon's near-vacuum with no side effects at all. And Samson and Goliath's superpowers don't explain it: they exposed themselves to the non-existent atmosphere before they changed to their super-powered forms.
• Wrong - powers+thundercats duplicate People breathing is space is one of the less bizarre aspects of how space works in SilverHawks. SilverHawks and ThunderCats use most of the same wonky rules for space, being by the same creators. There's air, gravity, and in the case of SilverHawks, night and day by virtue of switching on a gigantic light on a schedule. Ironic, as the show pretends to educate children about astronomy and space facts. Granted, the SilverHawks are explicitly stated to be full-conversion cyborgs and Limbo to be an Alternate Universe. God only knows what the rules are there.

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