From the article, it sounds like some of the symptons resemble "the bends" divers have when they surface too quickly. The cause of the bends is the change in pressure no longer being sufficient to keep the nitrogen dissolved in your blood, dissolved in your blood. Bubbles in blood veins are bad news.
Pretty much all of the issues with vacuum have to do with liquids becoming gases, and unsealed gases wanting to disperse. I have to imagine it's goddamn weird feeling the water evaporate off your eyeballs.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_acci...
"for at least a couple of minutes. Not that you would remain conscious long enough to rescue yourself, but if your predicament was accidental, there could be time for fellow crew members to rescue and repressurize you with few ill effects."
So be sure to practice a buddy system if you are going into outer space without full protective gear on at all times. There's a reason that the full title of the article submitted here is "Survival in Space Unprotected Is Possible--Briefly."
>During their exposure, they were unconscious and paralyzed. Gas expelled from their bowels and stomachs caused simultaneous defecation, projectile vomiting and urination. They suffered massive seizures. Their tongues were often coated in ice and the dogs swelled to resemble "an inflated goatskin bag," the authors wrote.
Horrible. If this knowledge is going to actually directly save human lives, and there's no better way, well OK then, but this is just a terrible, horrible thing to do to a creature like a dog or a chimpanzee.
I wondered just how many dogs were involved, and I found the following link: http://triscience.com/Animals/Muscle/experimental-animal-dec... It notes the test group was 125, with tests done in groups of 6. My impression is that their experience wasn't a waste, and was a benchmark study for decades.
While trying to find the original study, I stumbled across another that goes into some further detail. http://cousin.pascal1.free.fr/AVMA%20etude%20decom.pdf I don't have the constitution to read much medical research, but the impression is that the experience is markedly short. Physiologically decompression is pretty awful, but the subject doesn't suffer consciously. Hopefully that's a bit reassuring that the animals did not experience any horror film-like agony before blacking out (though it would be uncomfortable, to be sure).
http://yarchive.net/space/science/man_in_vacuum.html
There has been some real quality writing by certain individuals in the sci.space.* newsgroups about this and many other subjects (many of which are popular myths). You can learn a lot if you're interested in this kind of stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTNX6mr753w (hypoxia in an altitude chamber from "how to kill a a human being" documentary)
I guess radiation exposure is another big one.
1 - http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980301b....
Vacuum isn't. It is a terrible conductor of heat. So bad, that after 15 minutes a very small battery powered pen camera started to red on the edges of the video: it was starting to heat up! The only way to cool off is via radiation, which takes quite a while. If you had a large array of very conductive, high surface area material, then you could get cold. But our skin isn't like that. Rather, it's wet and insulative. The membranes that are wet immediately suffer evaporative cooling, but once frozen will have to sublime to cool any more, which is slow. The skin is dead on the outside and has layers of insulation in the form of water and fat.
No, the research, testing, and industrial accident reports show that you die from oxygen deprivation. (And you can find vacuum labeled as an asphyxiate, since inhaling it is deadly...)
EDIT: I should note that the temperature of the vacuum really is very low. That's not disputable. But there just aren't enough atoms in a vacuum for it to feel cold. It's one of those times our intuition about units sort of sets us up for failure: temperature is an average kinetic energy of each particle, and normally there are enough particles to matter. In a vacuum there usually aren't. (I'm lying of course: high energy plasmas can definitely heat something up given a few hours.)
As stated in the linked article:
"If we put a thermometer in darkest space, with absolutely nothing around, it would first have to cool off. This might take a very very long time. Once it cooled off, it would read 2.7 Kelvin."
So, the vacuum really is the main concern. You'd be long dead before you start getting cold.
If you have a perfectly empty box (with total vacuum inside) and the walls have some temperature (for example 2.7K) then, after a while, inside the box will appear the electromagnetic field with the blackbody radiation of the walls temperature.
It's convenient to assign properties to the electromagnetic field, in this case the temperature. And the correct temperature of the electromagnetic field inside the box is the same as the temperature of the walls.
And the best thing is that the walls are not necessary! You can assign a temperature to the universe background radiation. If the distribution of frequencies of the electromagnetic field is equal to the blackbody radiation of a 2.7K blackbody, then you can think that the temperature of the electromagnetic field is also 2.7K.
More details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_gas
That line of thinking leads to a complete lack of actual science. As the article points out: going into the vacuum of space is nowhere near as bad as is conventionally thought. That's an incredibly valuable finding, and it gives us the information we need to create effective safety and recovery mechanisms in space.
