Could Matt Damon go far with a hole-y spacesuit?

Film Buff investigates the facts behind outlandish movie plots.

THIS MONTH THE MARTIAN

QMatt Damon’s stranded astronaut needs an extra boost to reach his rescuing colleagues so cuts a hole in his suit to give him extra propulsion. Space cadet or correct?

ADR. GEMMA LAVENDER, ASTROPHYSICIST AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF,

ALL ABOUT SPACE

No, in reality this wouldn’t work at all. Spacesuits are made so that the astronaut experiences low pressure inside them; this allows them to carry out normal movement – bending their arms, moving their legs and generally carrying out scientific experiments and extravehicular activities (EVAs) with ease. Being inside a highly pressurised spacesuit would achieve the opposite – the astronaut would not be able to move at all, since the suit would be very stiff.

In The Martian, Mark Watney cuts a hole in his glove to propel himself towards his crew on the Hermes spacecraft - but to do so, he’d need exceedingly high pressures inside the suit to propel himself (pressures that couldn’t be sustained by the human body). Instead, and due to the low pressures required by spacesuits, the hole would cause the vacuum of space to leak into the suit – Watney would have experienced very slow propulsion that wouldn’t move him at all, and he would have suffocated with the suit’s warning systems activated.

Of course, with a hole in your spacesuit, your skin will be exposed to a different outside pressure. From NASA’s experience, when an astronaut discovered a breach in their suit during a spacewalk, they found their skin had become stuck in the gap and to the outside of the suit; the same would have happened with Watney’s hand, where it would have been sucked into the gap in order to close the hole.

VERDICT BOLLOCKS

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