An animated astronaut is floating in space.
Let’s say you were an astronaut in space, and you decide to take off your helmet.
The astronaut goes to grab their helmet.
*freeze frame*
What would happen?
To know this, we need to figure out what a space suit does.
The obvious answer is that a spacesuit is there to give you air to breathe. There’s no oxygen in space, so if you take off your helmet, well, you can’t breathe, right? That’s true. But that’s not the only thing a spacesuit does.
On Earth, we have oxygen all around us to breathe, but that’s not the only thing that is around us. Around us is Nitrogen, Argon, Hydrogen, and a bunch of other stuff other than Oxygen. All of this mass is what creates Earth’s atmosphere. How much air there is, we call air pressure. The more air, the more air pressure. The less air, the less air pressure.
And on Earth, there is a lot of it.
All that mass is pressing on you all the time. If you are in Florida, that’s about 14.7 pounds of air on top of every single square inch of your body.
That’s like having two elephants crushing down on your skin every single second of every day.
But wait….why aren’t we crushed, then?
That’s because the same pressure outside our bodies is happening inside our bodies too! We are at equilibrium, as our bodies grew up in Earth’s atmosphere and depends on it to keep its shape.
If you are an astronaut going to space, you are going from a place with plenty of air pressure (Earth) to a place with almost no air pressure whatsoever (outer space).
So what would happen if you take off your helmet in space?
Let’s do a science demonstration.
Here I have this balloon, and I’m going to draw a happy face on it. This will be our curious astronaut’s head. I’m going to inflate it, then tie it so no air can go in and out.
Here I have an air pressure chamber and vacuum. This glass jar has air just like it does outside of it. But I put Vaseline underneath and attached it to this vacuum. This vacuum will suck the air out from the glass jar, making the air pressure inside to be closer to outer space, a lot less than Earth.
I’m going to turn on the vacuum, and let’s see what happens.
The balloon inflates in size.
Well look at that, the balloon got bigger. We didn’t add any air into the balloon, all we did was take the air out from the jar.
Because there was less air pressure outside the balloon than inside of it, there was no equilibrium. With no air pressure outside the balloon to push and press against the balloon, the air inside the balloon had nothing stopping it from pushing out and expanding. Therefore, it got bigger.
The balloon continues to inflate and get bigger and bigger.
Hmmm, I wonder what this says about our astronaut…
The balloon explodes
Oh no.
WillyToons 
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