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We've all seen the scene in a movie where they space someone out an airlock.
It's been in a couple books too.
I've worked in a couple industrial settings and attended "lock-out, tag-out" classes.
I've been involved in builds where the premature opening of a valve means sewage gets into drinking water, so there's interlocks to prohibit that from happening.
Which makes me think the person being spaced will have a hell of a while to contemplate their fate as the executioner bypasses all the safeties to get the outer door open.
I can see vacc suits getting some form of RFID deal that transmits that the suit is sealed correctly to the airlock.
I can also see needing keys and passwords to work the doors at all.
Dicking around with the airlock is dangerous. Someone could vent the compartment, or worse, the whole ship.
A simple, mechanical, locking mechanism that keeps both doors from being open at the same time will probably be mandatory.
The execution, once the alarms are bypassed, will probably be less dramatic than the movies as well. Vent then open is how it will likely work because pressure on the outer door makes the mechanism work much harder...
"Great, his body is halfway out because the door got stuck half open because of YOUR flair for the dramatic, Dave!" If that's the ship's only airlock, you have a problem.
You did remember to put an emergency, portable, airlock in the ship's locker, didn't you?
Not to mention---people exposed to hard vacuum would not go *POP* like you read about. Human skin's a pretty good grade of leather. There have been proposals for "skin suits" that basically just pressurized the area around the head and were sealed against the skin, with the rest of the skin covered with a thin layer of fabric.
ReplyDeleteYou need some other supports to keep from distending the guts, but compression basically works. The Mercury suits were mostly just an air-tight bag and lacing.
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