Apollo I & 16.7 PSI Pure Oxygen

[heydaralon]

Google is at your fingertips

fair enough. One guy is saying that they did it because it affected cabin pressure and thus didn't need to use material as thick for the hull. So basically they were just saving fuel.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Google is at your fingertips

fair enough. One guy is saying that they did it because it affected cabin pressure and thus didn't need to use material as thick for the hull. So basically they were just saving fuel.

Sort of. Read the article in the OP, and there's a basic explanation of it.

The early capsules could only handle so much internal pressure, so since they couldn't just lower it without their pilots passing out, they added more oxygen to the mix. That way, the crew had enough of it, despite being at a pressure similar to Mt. Everest altitude.

Unfortunately, this was an (obviously) stupid workaround, and they should have just built better capsules, but that's government under pressure. A big organization like that is always going to have stupid-ass compromises, until something breaks.

[jseymour]

That's wild! I guess humans evolved to breathe air with only 20% oxygen idk. I wanna try some 02 now. All the teenagers are having these 0xygen parties where they dare eachother to breathe pure oxygen for hours on end. Its the latest dangerous trend.

"Prolonged exposure to above-normal oxygen partial pressures, or shorter exposures to very high partial pressures, can cause oxidative damage to cell membranes, collapse of the alveoli in the lungs, retinal detachment, and seizures."

If that is the case, why did NASA decide to use pure oxygen for the astronauts to breathe on the mission? Does it take weeks of breathing pure oxygen for this damage to happen or only a few days?


Do fighter pilots breathe pure oxygen on their flights?

If you read the article they explained that the weight of the aircraft to support a normal atmosphere would have been to heavy for the rockets so pure oxygen was used to reduce weight. Plus electronics and sensors were not good enough to use a mixed gas at the time.

We used OBA's in the Navy to fight fires. It stands for Oxygen breathing apparatus. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sit ... i1HITi41gM:

It used a chemical canister to make pure oxygen was good for about 1 hour but we set our times for 45 minutes to give us 15 minutes to get someplace and put in a new canister. We were always warned not to smoke after taking off our face masks, for at least an hour, because our skin was saturated and people had caught their face on fire from just trying to light a cigarette. May be a sea story, but I wasn't about to test the theory and I didn't smoke. Glad they got rid of those old things and went with modern SCBA like modern fire fighters use.

[doc_loliday]

Pretty great movie by the way.

[Speaker to Animals]

Pretty great movie by the way.

I think that was one of his top performances.

[doc_loliday]

Agreed. The first 20 mins of that movie are super intense.