The bell used a clamp to isolate it from the chambers. One of the chambers also connected to a diving bell. Four divers were in two connected chambers at a pressure of 9 atmospheres. The platform was drilling in the Frigg gas field in the North Sea. Photo credit: Byford Dolphin in Dry Dock by Josef Pavlik CC-SA 3.0. Five crew died and a sixth was seriously injured. A drilling rig, the Byford Dolphin, had an accident in 1983. It just takes a bigger pressure differential. So does that mean exploding people are just a movie phenomena? Not quite. Instead of the normal thirty minute repress sequence, engineers restored air to the chamber in 87 seconds, although he got emergency oxygen 25 seconds later. The fact that he could report this should tell you that it all ended well. LeBlanc reported he could feel saliva boiling off his tongue before he passed out. Within 10 seconds, the pressure in his suit went from 3.8 PSI to nearly zero. Wearing a Gemini space suit, he entered a vacuum chamber and had an accidental pressure hose disconnect. In 1966, NASA spacesuit technician Jim LeBlanc found out about the first problem the hard way. But you are a meat balloon if you experience a much greater change in pressure. You are much more likely to die from a pulmonary embolism or simple suffocation. But it isn’t enough to just make you pop like some meat balloon. It turns out, dropping pressure from one atmosphere to near zero is not really good for you as you might expect. ![]() Others show distressed space travelers surviving in space for at least brief periods. But what about the age-old trope of explosive decompression? Some movies show gross body parts flying everywhere. What would Star Wars be without the sounds of an epic battle in space where there should be no sound? But there are plenty of other examples where things are wrong and it would have been just as easy to get them right - the direction of space debris in the movie Gravity, for example. The truth is, some things just make movies better, even if they are wrong. ![]() “It wouldn’t happen that way in real life.” One of the most annoying habits of people really into the “sci” of sci-fi is nitpicking scientific inaccuracies in movies.
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