If an astronaut experiences a survivable suit puncture—due to any cause—he or she will have plenty of time to call for help, or more likely, call to abort the EVA. Suit life support systems are designed to replace leaking air up to a certain point, and even a fairly serious puncture or cut could likely be manually crimped to slow the leak enough to buy rescue time.
But if a suit is breached to vacuum, the occupant is going to die. Even if the wearer is sitting in an open airlock with a suited rescuer looking at them, it probably would not be possible to close the door and pressurize the lock in less time than it takes to die, or at least suffer life-threatening—or at the very least mission threatening decompression injuries.
The occupant would be unable to call for help, but mission control would immediately see the problem through suit and biomed telemetry. The trouble is, they couldn’t do anything quickly enough to be of help.
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Read other answers by C Stuart Hardwick on Quora:
- What would happen if I was on a spacewalk and I took my spacesuit off?
- What inspired you to become an astronaut?
- Have any astronauts or cosmonauts been harmed by their time in space?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2fpfOYT
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