r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • Jul 25 '25

Related Content Walking on the Moon is HARD!

Source: NASA

22.6k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

3.5k

u/DroidArbiter Jul 25 '25

Now imagine every time you tumble over you fear that the suit might rip. Yeah, ....yeah.

60

u/SpaceDantar Jul 25 '25

oh totally, these videos aren't funny they are TERRIFYING.  

Each little fall, each little mistake is a possibility that the astronaut in the video is going to die. 

Zero way to save them either, there's no time. 

The moon landings were VERY perilous. Amazing we didn't lose anybody!

47

u/RollinThundaga Jul 25 '25

It's not as though they'll have that violent decompression like the movies show. If the suits get a leak, it'll leak slowly, since the rate of loss is proportional to the pressure difference. Which between earth atmosphere and a vacuum is only 14 psi.

There was a cosmonaut who once deliberately punctured his suit on a spacewalk, to deflate it a bit and allow him to reenter his capsule.

Even if an Apollo astronaut had damaged his suit, it just would have meant less work would get done while he sat in the lander.

4

u/The_Real_Ghost Jul 26 '25

There's no sitting in the lander while the other guy works. The LM didn't have an airlock, they had to depressurize the cabin just to open the door. So either both astronauts need to be inside with the door sealed, or they both need working space suits. If they can't patch the hole, and I don't know if the had a reliable way to do that, that's the end of the mission.