Bodily Indignities … in Space!

We’ve all seen the moment in the movie: some unhappy astronaut is flushed into the vacuum of space without their suit. The gasp like a fish, flop around, and then, dramatically, freeze solid before out eyes. Except it probably wouldn’t happen like that at all; while space is astonishingly cold, its emptiness wouldn’t allow heat to dissipate that quickly. And the low pressure would most likely make your bodily fluids boil before they could freeze.

What a happy thought! Hope you haven’t recently eaten lunch!

Death certainly isn’t the only weird or inconvenient thing which will await our frail human bodies if we start to live and work in space, though. This article addresses a few more of them.