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What this article leads me to think is that, if we managed to create a thin elastic tight-fitting suit that compressed the body with the equivalent pressure of
by adlpz 13y ago
What this article leads me to think is that, if we managed to create a thin elastic tight-fitting suit that compressed the body with the equivalent pressure of Earth's atmosphere, the issues with lung overpressure would be negated and we could, ignoring radiation and temperature issues, just be in space with scuba gear.
That would be awesome.
- jlgreco 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_activity_suit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_activity_suit There are a lot of advantages to this idea, but it is not without tradeoffs. For example, for these sorts of suits to work properly they need to be in contact with all of your body. Any gap, between your toes or your legs... and you will have problems. This can be overcome but you basically end up having to tailor each suit to a particular astronaut. The suits currently used on the ISS are not specially tailored, they basically just have "small/medium/large" (though they have a greater variety of sizes for gloves).
- jacquesm 13y agoHeatshrink?
- jlgreco 13y agoHmm, interesting idea. You might actually be able to make quick super-light one-time use spacesuits like that. Mechanical compression suits are lighter than pressure suits in the first place (in addition to being less bulky), so having every astronaut bring along their own might not be too unreasonable now that I think about it. More labor with the tailoring bit, but not if you heatshrink them...
- jacquesm 13y agoOne possible problem is the 'sunburn' aspect, heatshrink tends to want to shrink more the longer you heat it. So being exposed to direct sunlight might cause you to get squeezed. Maybe there is a way to limit the amount of inward pressure that the heatshrink would create.
- jlgreco 13y agoYou may be able to get around that with a loose-fitting mylar (or similar) outer-garment.
- jacquesm 13y agoI should try this, I have some pretty large diameter heatshrink lying around in a warehouse, next time I'm there I will bring it with me. Better try it on some sausage or a (dead) chicken first :)
- jlgreco 13y agoYes, please try it on food first... that might be a hard one to explain at the hospital if it goes wrong. :P
- rjsw 13y agoI think that the Space Activity Suit project proposed that you would wear an extra loose layer over the top to provide some micrometeorite protection.
- anonymous 13y agoMaybe some sort of spray-on rubber that cures on contact with air? You'd get naked, put on your helmet and enter the spray-chamber that will coat your body thickly and evenly.
- Retric 13y agoCooling is actually a major issue with this idea. Working in space your going to encounter a huge temperature range so you want a fair amount of insulation, but dumping heat to the vacuume of space is much harder than cooling off on a hot day so current suits use an environmental control suystem to cool as needed.
- brazzy 13y ago> dumping heat to the vacuume of space is much harder than cooling off on a hot day Is it? A naive application of the Stefan–Boltzmann law yields a loss of about 1 kW through heat radiation alone.
- mr_luc 13y ago"Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" by Heinlein mentioned this -- I remember as a kid I hadn't understood it.