Space Suit Testing

NASA once accidentally depressurized a man while testing space suits in a vacuum chamber. He lost consciousness in less than 15 seconds, but fully recovered after depressurization. He reported feeling his saliva boil which is... exciting. ▶ this video link During Project Excelsior, Joseph Kittinger's right hand was depressurized at 100,000 feet and swelled up, but he was ultimately unharmed. link

I think this is the actual study: link I fundamentally dissagree that it was trivial, but I worked on large vacuum systems and feel a bit close to the topic. But I also fundamentally agree that the experimentation was barbaric and cruel. But... I also don't see how we could have worked around it. I hope it's some consolation that they never doubly-exposed the dogs; I'm actually surprised that wasn't attempted. Unshielded hard vacuum is horrific. The problem isn't that it's awful - that's obvious - but exactly how does it affect the body? (I've sealed a hole with my hand and got a hickey, but I've never been immersed in it.) Even today, studying things in a vacuum is difficult; it's always behind a think layer of material that's hard to observe through, and even with cleverness you're testing through the neck of a bottle or only looking back on data logged by some gizmo. And there are a lot of confounding variables; narrowing the time-to-unconciousness/death was the most critical, and each test batch needed multiple samples to make sure no data was wasted. One note that came out was that it seems clearly better to recompress with pure oxygen; would that fire hazard be worth the risk in space (especially after Apollo 1), or would they need to design a mechanism to temporarily mange it? I could see that argument having a significant impact on the cabin design. But yeah. We can do better. A damn sight better. We can illuminate and record and monitor so much better. A couple yea

There was a notable incident in the 1960s where a NASA spacesuit technician named Jim LeBlanc survived an accidental (but brief) depressurization. There's a YouTube video describing the accident which includes film of the accident itself: ▶ this video .