If Apollo 11 had failed.

[Specialist290]

Fair enough. I can see how an experience like that would be pretty traumatic.

Still, I have doubts that every human on earth will react precisely the same way in the same set of circumstances. You might bite down on that tablet; hell, maybe I would, too, although I hope I never have the opportunity to find out; some others might choose to hold out to the bitter end.

[rpayne88]

This thread is getting too morbid. Guess its time to inject a little bit of humor. Neil and Buzz said they would try to fix it until the end, so...

"They've got to have duct tape with them. Tell the to use it. Duct tape fixes everything!" (Not a real quote)

[Temstar]

Awww duct tape, it's been on every American space flight since Gemini. And for a good reason too - it was used to create the CO2 scrubber adapter on Apollo 13 and then used on Apollo 17 again (along with a map) to build a improvised moon buggie fender after the original broke off.

[99TheCreator]

Duct tape solves everything, even spaceship failures.

[AllenM3]

No there were no suicide pill. Jim Lovell wrote about it in his book about Apollo 13:

Since Apollo 13 many people have asked me, "Did you have suicide pills on board?" We didn't, and I never heard of such a thing in the eleven years I spent as an astronaut and NASA executive.

I did, of course, occasionally think of the possibility that the spacecraft explosion might maroon us in an enormous orbit about the Earth - a sort of perpetual monument to the space program. But Jack Swigert, Fred Haise, and I never talked about that fate during our perilous flight. I guess we were too busy struggling for survival.

It will be easy enough to kill yourself in space painlessly by taking off your helmet.

Thats kind of frightening to think about. Like what if the explosion on Apollo 13 disabled the vessel and threw it into some crazy huge orbit around earth.

Wouldn't it be weird living in a time, knowing that there is a spacecraft thats been orbiting earth for the last 43 years with 3 dead astronauts in it... crazy.

[SuperWeegee4000]

That speech.

[Dunbaratu]

Well, I am only repeating what they said. And I'm not inclined to call them liars, I was taught not to speak ill of the dead, and Buzz is known to punch people

There's a wide gulf of difference between saying you would try everything you could think of to get back versus saying you would never take the suicide pill. They're not the same claim. Not in the slightest. A person who won't take the pill immediately might still reserve it for the last option only after having tried everything they could think of and after starting to die anyway the painful way.

There is nothing contradictory between what the astronauts said and the idea that they might have had to resort to using the pills.

All their statements mean is that they wouldn't have tried the pills as a first resort.

[Captain Sierra]

Let me put an end to all this talk of what humans do in the face of death.

I've been pinned at the bottom of a pool. Someone stood on my shoulders in 10 feet of water. I was half choking, oxygen deprived, and couldnt see (no goggles, eyes shut). I think that's far more impared than just CO2 intoxicated and yet I was able to get out (though I almost passed out by the time I broke the surface). Point here is that in the face of death, there is nothing basic human reactions won't do to try and live. They would have kept trying literally anything until the air ran out and when your mind is thinking about nothing except "gotta do something to get out", that overrides panic. Trust me, I know.

[lajoswinkler]

You're missing the fact that suffocating underwater is different from breathing an atmosphere that's slowly losing O2 and increasing in CO2. Suffocating and choking are more sudden and abrupt than breathing in increasingly worse air.

In any case, there's no overriding panic. Elevated partial pressure of CO2 in blood triggers a panic response. It's a physiological reaction and no amount of training can supress it.

Remember that physiological panic and emotional panic aren't the same thing. Emotional panic can be absent in rare occasions.

If you've experienced only the "gotta do something to get out" phase, you haven't suffered enough. If the suffocation lasts long enough, the victim stops thinking clearly because of the air hunger. Orientation in space is lost, and convulsions appear. Been there. Not pleasant.

After consciousness shuts down, muscles relax and breathing impulses become very shallow and irregular. There is still some spasms, but they're gradual and slow. After few minutes it all stops. Heart falls into arrest. Without fresh supply of O2, brain starts shutting down, causing weird imprints that, if the victim is revived, sometimes (rarely) don't get erased. That's how "tunnels and encounters with angels" stories are formed.

Post mortem examination of abrupt suffocation reveal bloody eyes, often protruded tongue and eyes, bloody mucus in respiratory system, hemorrhage in pulmonary tissue and relaxed muscle sphincters (resulting in release of waste products). Because the victim is regularly pinned down or somehow didn't manage to escape, tendon, muscle and sometimes even bone damage is apparent because of the twitching.

Breathing in depleted air often results in increasingly worse spasms of upper respiratory system and abrupt nausea might occur. Basically you cough and start puking in the middle of it.

There is no way anyone would stay calm through that horror.

Unfortunatelly, I think all those poison pills act as fast cytochrome poisons, so the brain is quickly depleted from oxygen and consciousness shuts down fast... but it's not painless. It's still suffering, albeit faster.

Maybe the best solution would be to eat the pill, wait for the symptoms to appear and then depressurize the compartment. In case you don't have the pill, depressurization is a faster death than slowly depleting O2.

[dharak1]

Guys, I want to say. I have been suffocated. And it wasn't with any gas but with straight air restriction. Not a few hours of air, a few minutes. It was painless. Water is different. I have nearly drowned too. Both are scary the water stung and hurt and I felt heavy, the air was painless and I could barely tell. It was terrifying. I was also locked in a wooden box for a few minutes when I was 7. No one knew I was there and I could have died. The point is I would rather walk off in the distance and die away from other people with no pill thank die within a few feet knowing when it will happen.

[lajoswinkler]

Your post is uncomprehensible to me. How much times have you suffocated? Two or three?

You were locked in a box and you've spent all your air inside and passed out? And it was painless? You're either lying, or your're an alien (or otherwise altered), or your memory of the event has been erased.

I'll go with the third option. It was probably a terrible trauma that your brain chose to push deep inside you.

Face it, we all have the same basic mechanisms in our bodies. Saying you can pass out effortlessly in an atmosphere of slowly increasing CO2 partial pressure is like saying that you've tricked someone into thinking you were dead by suspending your heartbeats, or fooling around by temporarily shutting down spinal reflexes. It just doesn't work.

Edited September 11, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[dharak1]

I was panicking but it didn't hurt.

[NASAFanboy]

By the way.

There's that unit of 21 British-Indian soldiers who held off more than 10,000 Afghans. They got repeated chances to surrender, they could run, but they all fought to the death, knowing that their end would be inevitable. The time they delayed the Afghans allowed te British to ramp up defenses and saved the day.

You sir, who claim that all humans will eventually become cowards, are wrong. One Afghan stayed at his watchtower post even as it was being burned down. He was given repeated chances to surrender by the Afghans below him, but said "no", and kept fighting and warning the British as his tower burned down

Personally if all else failed, I would've walked to a hill with a nice view of Earth, send back as much data as possible, say "goodbye" to my family, make my request for NASA to have more money and more public support broadcast on TV, then self-terminate with the pills.

Edited September 12, 2013 by NASAFanboy

[lajoswinkler]

The amount of straw man fallacies on this thread is steadily increasing. Either you guys can't comprehend written words or you're just trolling.

[ajshell1]

I think Scott Manley used this speech after he botched a mun landing (I think it was about .13, so it was much harder back then).