With NASA aiming to return humans to the moon later this decade and perhaps send humans to Mars in the 2030s, a lot of thinking will be needed about how humans can survive long-distance travel in space.
But what if the unthinkable happens and someone dies?
In six decades of human spaceflight, a total of 20 people have died — 14 in NASA’s space shuttle tragedies of 1986 and 2003, three cosmonauts on the Soyuz 11 mission in 1971, and three astronauts on the Apollo 1 launch pad in 1967.
However, none of them were actually killed in space itself.
NASA has not established any protocols for dealing with death in space, but researchers around the world have advanced how to handle such a tragedy.
NASA has not established protocols for dealing with death in space, but researchers around the world have put forward how to deal with such a tragedy
First of all, it’s important to point out that there are a number of ways space can kill you.
Chief among them is being exposed to the vacuum of space without a pressure suit for protection, perhaps due to damage to the garment or an unexpected spacecraft malfunction that exposes an astronaut to the cosmos.
Canadian astronaut and former commander of the International Space Station (ISS) Chris Hadfield provides an example.
“Worst case scenario, something happens during a spacewalk,” he said.
‘You can suddenly be hit by a micrometeorite, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
“It can poke a hole in your suit and you’ll be incapacitated in seconds.”
Exposure to the vacuum of space would make it impossible for a person to breathe and would lead to boiling of their blood and other bodily fluids, according to Emmanuel Urquieta, a professor of space medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
The astronaut would likely have only 15 seconds before losing consciousness, making suffocation or decompression the most likely cause of death.
That’s because in about 10 seconds, the water in their skin and blood would evaporate, causing the body to expand like a balloon that fills with air and leads to their lungs collapsing.
Within 30 seconds, the astronaut would be paralyzed, if not already dead.
Whether you held your breath or not would also make a difference to how quickly you perished.
Canadian astronaut and former commander of the International Space Station Chris Hadfield (pictured) gave an example of how a death could occur in space. ‘You can suddenly be hit by a micrometeorite, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It can poke a hole in your suit and you’re incapacitated in seconds,” he said.
Exposure to the vacuum of space would make it impossible for a person to breathe and would lead to their blood and other bodily fluids boiling, according to Emmanuel Urquieta, a professor of space medicine at Baylor College of Medicine
If you did, the air in your lungs would expand, rupture your lungs, and kill you pretty quickly. If you didn’t, you could stay conscious for up to two minutes.
So if the worst happened, what would happen to the body?
Well, it wouldn’t freeze right away.
In a vacuum, the only way to lose heat is through evaporation of liquid or through radiation, which happens very slowly for a relatively cool object like a human body.
Eventually, however, it would end up in a frozen, mummified state where it would then sail through the cosmos for millions of years until perhaps one day it encountered another planet or star and was destroyed by the heat or radiation.
But what if your body could be restored?
Experts say it would likely be returned to Earth if a death occurred during a short mission to places like the ISS or the moon.
But on a tour to Mars, that wouldn’t be immediately possible, because a crew might have been millions of miles away when it happened.
Instead, the body could potentially be frozen in the cold of space to reduce weight and make it easier to stow away on the way back to our planet, according to Professor Christopher Newman and Professor Nick Caplan of Northumbria University.
Or it would have to be kept in a specialized body bag, according to Professor Urquieta.
NASA has strict laws about contaminating other planets with terrestrial microbes. An astronaut could not be buried on Mars if he died there, researchers suggest
He said cremation would not be possible on the Red Planet because it “costs too much energy for the surviving crew to use for other purposes’.
Burial is also not an option because bacteria and other organisms from the human remains could contaminate Mars.
NASA actually has strict laws about contaminating other planets with terrestrial microbes, according to Catherine Conley of NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection.
She said they should all be killed, bringing cremation back into play, but the most likely outcome would be to keep the body on the spacecraft until it can be returned to Earth.
So how would a death on Mars or the moon differ from one en route to such a destination?
Well, it would be a similar outcome if an astronaut didn’t have a space suit to protect him.
That’s because our moon satellite has almost no atmosphere at all and Mars has a very thin atmosphere with almost no oxygen.
There is also the danger of radiation.
Previous data from the red plant suggests it is hit by 700 times the radiation experienced on Earth.
Radiation can alter the cardiovascular system, damage the heart, harden and narrow arteries, or eliminate some cells in the lining of the blood vessels, leading to cardiovascular disease and perhaps ending in death.
All of these factors will need to be considered if and when a future human mission to Mars is attempted.
For now, though, NASA is focusing on returning human boots to the moon by 2025 as part of its Artemis program.