The National Aeronautics Space Agency, NASA, recently said that there was no confirmed plan to deal with a body if an astronaut died during a spacewalk. “NASA’s response to any unplanned on-orbit situation will be determined in a real-time collaborative process between the Flight Operations Directorate, NASA leadership, Human Health and Performance Directorate, and our International Partners,” the agency told Popular Science magazine.
The crew of Soyuz 11, on the 1971 Soviet mission, were the only three people who died in space. The crew visited the first-ever space station and died when their capsule lost pressure.
In the investigation, the crew was found to have suffered brain haemorrhages as the nitrogen and oxygen present in their bodies bubbled and burst their blood vessels.
However, NASA has tried to address the issue of storing bodies in space as there’s no certainty that the deceased body would return to Earth for a funeral. Swedish eco-burial company Promessa is working on engineering spatially economic space coffins that would constrict a dead body into a freeze-dried tablet of ice crystals.
ISS and shuttle astronaut Terry Virts said that astronauts usually don’t talk about fatal accidents that might occur due to an equipment failure.
He said, “We all understand it’s a possibility, but nobody wants to discuss it.”
Jim LeBlanc, on December 14, 1966, volunteered to test the spacesuits that NASA had planned to use for its Apollo programme and for which he went into a specially constructed vacuum chamber.
During the test, the hose-designed Le Blanc suit pressurized became disconnected and in just a matter of seconds, the air pressure dropped from 3.8 psi to almost zero and he quickly lost consciousness.
In less than a minute, Cliff Hess, the supervisor of the test entered through the half-hour depressurization process and in the next 25 seconds, a technician wearing an oxygen mask had entered the chamber to help LeBlanc.
Fortunately, by the time a doctor entered the chamber, LeBlanc was standing on his feet. He said he was roughly feeling any side effects from the experience.
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