I think the received wisdom about spacesuits is that even the smallest tear in the fabric during a mission in outer space will lead to certain death. Not necessarily so, says Cathleen Lewis, curator at Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, during a Reddit AMA. Three exchanges follow.

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Question:

What would happen if a spacesuit were to be punctured while in space?

Cathleen Lewis:

First of all, there has never been a loss of an astronaut or cosmonaut due to a spacesuit failure. Second, please forget everything that you have seen in science fiction movies about spacesuit failures. They are usually overly dramatized and frequently wrong. There have been four documented cases of spacesuit failures in history. None resulted in deaths. Without a spacesuit and the oxygen necessary to breathe, an astronaut would immediately feel the nitrogen coming out of his fluids, almost like the tears and saliva were carbonated. After about 15 seconds, he would pass out and, without an emergency rescue, he would die within two minutes. The body would float in space and only very slowly lose body heat because there is no efficient way to radiate heat away from the body. In the case of a small puncture, usually the flesh would swell in the immediate area and stopper the hole. This can be extremely painful, but the victim would recover.

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Question:

What are other countries space suits like compared to ours?

Cathleen Lewis:

Remarkably, even though all spacesuits perform similar functions, they do not look alike. When the Soviet Union designed a suit to carry men to the Moon, they opted for a single piece suit that the cosmonaut would climb in through a hinged backpack. The Russians maintain a similar design in the EVA suits that cosmonauts wear when they do spacewalks from the Russian node of the International Space Station. These dissimilarities result from differences in available materials, different senses of aesthetics, and differing attitudes about innovation and refinement of design. The Russians remain very conservative and have retained many of the features that they designed for their first suits over 50 years ago. On the U.S. side, there is a greater effort at matching the spacesuit to the spacecraft and the mission. There is also the contracting and bidding issue that complicates the American side, but I won’t go into that here. You should also look at the Chinese spacesuits. They are remarkably similar to the Russian launch and entry suits. One assumes that they learned this design from the years that they worked with the Soviets and Russians in preparation for their own human spaceflight program.

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Question:

Regardless of accuracy, what is your favorite movie space suit?

Cathleen Lewis:

It hasn’t opened yet, but I am anxiously awaiting Ridley Scott’s The Martian. I loved the book and from the promotions, he seems to have gotten the spacesuit right. Usually in movies the helmets are too big. I understand that this is for filming and showing the actors’s faces, but it is a distracting feature for a spacesuit curator.•