In 1966, an aerospace engineer at NASA, Jim LeBlanc, was helping to test the performance of spacesuit prototypes in a massive vacuum chamber. Some humans have actually been exposed to near-vacuums and survived to tell the tale. “In essence, all of your body tissues that contain water will start to expand,” he said. In the absence of pressure, liquid water in our bodies would boil - changing immediately from a liquid to a gas. Kris Lehnhardt, a NASA operational space medicine physician, told Live Science. “As you can imagine, given that 60% of the human body is made up of water, this is a serious problem,” Dr. But because there is virtually no atmospheric pressure in space, the boiling point of liquids decreases significantly. If the pressure exerted by the air outside a liquid is high, as it is at sea level on Earth, it’s harder for bubbles of gas to form, rise to the surface and escape. Atmospheric pressure determines the temperatures at which liquids boil and turn gaseous. Space is a vacuum devoid of air - meaning that, unlike on Earth, there’s no atmosphere and no pressure exerted by air molecules.
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