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VoxEcho t1_jdoj1cn wrote

The reason explosive decompression can be a thing in a plane but not in space is because of the force of outside air acting on things inside of the vehicle. If something acts on an air plane to abruptly depressurize it through a sufficiently large enough hole, it isn't so much that things are "sucked" out of it as it is that things are "blown" out of it. It is the same force that makes it feel like something can get sucked out of a car window when your vehicle is in motion even though there isn't actually a meaningful pressure difference between your closed car and the outside air, it has to do more with the motion of the air along the vehicle.

In a vacuum things like gasses (air) would expand outwards through a breach, but there isn't the same force acting on a space shuttle that there is on a vehicle in motion on Earth, the popular media idea of things getting explosively decompressed out of a spaceship wouldn't actually happen outside of the force of whatever caused the breach to occur in the first place.

The force exerted by air expanding into a lower pressure area, like what would happen if you "opened the car door" so to speak, but in outer space, isn't enough to actually "suck" things out of the vehicle. Except probably really light things like paper or something, depending on how abrupt the breach was and how big (or, small) it is. You'd basically have to get sucked through a garden hose to generate enough pressure to drag a human body out of a spaceship -- and in that specific theoretical you'd block the opening with your clothing or just the weight of your body far before any actual bodily damage would occur. It probably wouldn't be fun to experience but you'd survive and with all your limbs.

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