Would a duct tape spacesuit be practical?

Question

Spoilers ahead for season 2 of For All Mankind.

In the finale of For All Mankind season 2 it is necessary for two astronauts to go outside the lunar base to effect repairs, but they have no spacesuits. With the clock ticking they come up with a plan, with help from NASA engineers on Earth, to use duct tape instead. The "suits" they construct look like this:

Essentially duct tape wrapped around the body, over clothing which looks like standard NASA jumpsuits for pressurized environments onboard spacecraft. The masks are described as "oxygen masks that have the full face covering".

The astronauts are the only side for around 20-25 seconds and in the end, die of exposure to vacuum and extreme temperature anyway. They are shown bleeding from gaps in the tape as soon as they experience vacuum.

Is this kind of "suit" at all practical or useful in real life? Say an astronaut needed to pass between two buildings on the surface of the Moon, or between two spacecraft in close proximity, would they provide any benefit?

Answer 1

If the suit would be useful, it has to be inflated. Which is definitively not how it looks like in images. If you could manage duct tape to hold the inner pressure for a moment without rupturing and/or leaking immediately, it would clearly help, but in the same moment, the "suit" would turn so stiff from pressure that it would be impossible to perform any work or even move at all. (This is a real issue with all spacesuits and usual reason why they are pressurized with pure oxygen at lower than atmospheric pressure. Alexey Leonov had to intentionally decrease pressure in his spacesuit to be able to overcome its rigidity and get back into Voskhod spacecraft.).

Actually, they could as well have just jumped outside without any suit-attempt at all. A vacuum won't kill you. Not instantly. On the other hand what will probably kill or at least fatally injure directly is a pressure difference. If there would be zero pressure outside your chest, you tissues wouldn't like it, having 1 bar inside lungs. Better to open your mouth and let all over-pressure out. So definitively no face mask.

This is a good strategy and you are not going to die in seconds or so. Nevertheless the critical problem is that you are losing oxygen from blood much faster than when holding your breath under normal conditions. The time of useful consciousness will be the biggest problem. With your lungs and blood circulation open to nearly-vacuum you have maybe not have more than 10 s for any useful action. You wouldn't die directly afterwards, but you would lose the ability to think and soon afterwards consciousness. (Still fine to recover if someone else could drag you back into normal pressure soon, but that was not an option here, I guess.)

Cold is not an issue. Just do not forget to wear good shoes and thick gloves. Vacuum is the best insulator around, so the only thing to worry about would be contact points. (Maybe you can get some nasty sunburn on uncovered skin, but I doubt it would be critical for such a short time.)

If you somehow made it back still conscious, possible fatal late effects would result from lungs injury (it was really not a good idea to try to hold your breath) and decompression sickness. Hard to tell how much manageable or fatal, depends on available care etc. too.

There is actually one well-known historical case, year 1966, NASA technician Jim LeBlanc got accidentally exposed to vacuum. He was exposed for more than one minute and recovered without any permanent damage. Nevertheless he became unconscious in 15 seconds. There is a paper describing a different near-vacuum incident which resulted in significant pressure-related trauma to lungs, but not death.

And then there is a chapter in A.C.Clark's Earthlight about moving through a vacuum. Yes, fiction, but at least somehow researched.

Answer 2

Completely impossible. The problem is you can't breathe. The average person can only breathe against about 5,000 pascals of pressure. On the summit of Everest you have 5,700 pascals of oxygen.

Beyond that you have the problem that duct tape doesn't stretch. How are you going to inhale at all? If you want to be able to breathe you need a hard helmet and torso.

The limbs are a different issue. I do not believe anyone has actually built a counterpressure suit but the idea has been seriously considered. Counterpressure suits simply apply pressure to the wearer, only the helmet/torso and the seals where the arms and legs go through need to be airtight, the limbs are in vacuum. (Yes, this is safe. The skin can handle it fine, you just need to keep the body from swelling.)

Duct tape is going to have a different problem, though--how do you expect to bend your joints?

Answer 3

Interesting question.

First of all, they possibly wouldn't experience extreme temperatures over the period of a part of a minute if they do not touch anything.

The real problem is indeed the possible gaps in the suit, but one should not expect any bleeding. Withdrawing air pressure is not enough to make normal skin bleed.

I think the main problem would be the areas of interface between the mask and the other parts of the suit (in mechanical counterpressure spacesuits the interfaces between the helmet and neck and between gloves and arms would be the biggest problems), mechanical strength of the tape and the ability to stretch the tape with enough pressure (particularly, in the head area, between the legs, armpits, etc).

You also would need to bend your chest tightly so to be able to breath. A tape which is not elastic would be problematic here, because you would need to maintain roughly the same pressure with full and empty lungs.

Actually, there are four types of possible problems:

• Blood embolism (appearing of bubbles in the blood)
• Inability to breathe (either inhale or exhale depending on tightness of the tape)
• Air leaks
• Local injuries to exposed skin (swelling).

Answer 4

If will work fine, in the extreme short term. Like, 2 minutes tops.

With no protection from the vacuum, you have to void the air from your lungs.. Unconciousness in 15 seconds due to very rapid oxygen loss through the lungs.
(your lungs will also take all sorts of interesting damage, but you will be dead already)

With a pressurized seal, such as this facemask:
If you can maintain acceptable pressure in the lungs, even if not breathing, you are good for about 1 minute, and can live for 2 minutes. Basically, it's just holding your breath. The rest of your body could be completely naked, as long as you can maintain pressure in your respiratory system. Yes, you will take all sorts of damage from exposure, but none of that is lethal, especially in the very short term.

The duct tape will not create an airtight seal. All of that duct tape on the abdomen, arms and legs will just impede movement. Even if you DO get an airtight seal, it will still not allow the lungs to expand or contract, thus making breathing impractical.

A setup like that would work to quickly dash outside, turn a valve, and dash back in. Or to cross from one vehicle to another. But no sustained action will be possible, and the use of all that tape on the arms and body will actually be counterproductive, reducing your ability without providing measurable protection.

Answer 5

First of all, the idea as proposed in the movie is pretty crazy. What they would more likely use is Kapton tape, which is a kind of space rated duct tape. It's yellow-brown, actually could hold an atmosphere reasonably well for a short period of time, wouldn't outgas, etc. See the two compared below.

There are two obvious problems for the show in this regard. First of all, Kapton table is slightly translucent, which would make it a problem for much TV! Secondly, it isn't as well known.

As to if it would even be useful, it is theoretically possible to put Kapton tape over clothing, if done properly it could be air tight enough for a short period of time. As others have mentioned, exposure to a vacuum has problems that rate something as follows:

1. Too much air in lungs, "blowing up"- Death in a few seconds.
2. Exhale, but pure exposure- Death in maybe 30 seconds, would be hard to do anything, but theoretically possible.
3. Some kind of a face mask, but otherwise no pressure suit- Death by the inability to breath out. Similar to the case of holding breath under water, death in a few minutes, or less if exertion.
4. Pressure band around chest, any "holes" in the body covered- This could actually work for maybe 10-15 minutes, or even longer. If one can put enough pressure around the chest to allow for breathing out, and all bodily holes are covered, then some bruising would certainly result, but otherwise not be too bad.

So if I was going to propose such a situation, I would suggest using something to contract around the lungs, use Kapton tap, and probably make sure to cover up any other holes in the skin where fluids might come out. If all of those things were done, and the face mask was properly sealed around one's face, survival for a few minutes isn't out of the possibility.

Of some note is that the Apollo Moonwalkers did something somewhat similar. They dropped the life support systems out the hatch before taking off from the Moon from the lunar module. To accomplish this, they wore their suits, opened up the hatch, and either threw the backpack out, or kicked it out. They were actually hooked up to the LM life support system for this operation, although they could have had a short period (Around 5 minutes) without being hooked up. Theoretically they could do a 5 minute EVA with these suits on, which there were some contingency procedures that might be required. If you are interested, Scott Manley has an excellent video on that subject, linked below.

Answer 6

Yes

At least according to this recent video by Scott Manley. He points out that purely mechanical compression suits for high altitude flights exist and work. For example the suit Felix Baumgartner wore during his Red Bull Stratos skydiving jump from 40km altitude. You need a certain oxygen pressure in your lungs to avoid boiling of water and to be able to take up oxygen. Once you are above that pressure you can quickly reach several minutes of useful consciousness. You can counter the pressure inside the lungs with straps around the chest (to avoid exploding your lungs). The straps don’t have to be airtight or pressurized. He points out that compression on limbs would be useful because it would avoid swelling.

Answer 7

it would have to be pressurized. EVA suits require a cooling suit to regulate temperature, because the outside of the spacesuit itself can become extremely hot or cold and would cause burns if touched directly with skin/thin fabric of only a flightsuit. i would say unpressurized, it would be ineffective and you would die. just because one COULD last in a suit with only the face pressurized, doesn't mean that's ideal, it would cause damage due to having your body exposed to the vacuum of space

Answer 8

Radiation would be a problem. Nasa space suits are radiation shielded, as well as pressurized, contain a drinking water tube as well as a way to get rid of that water at the other end. Space is full of hard radiation. Cosmic rays are high speed particles that can cause serious damage to your cells, resulting in cancer or other issues. Astronauts who have spent a long time in space tend to develop eyesight problems, probably from radiation exposure even inside heavily shielded ships.

Unless this tape is a couple of inches thick and made of a dense element like lead, it's not going to help much with radiation, and you're probably going to get sick, in addition to all the exposure and pressure problems people have already discussed!