How many dead bodies are in space?

+1 vote
asked Aug 5, 2020 in Science by marino760 (360 points)
How many dead bodies are in space?

1 Answer

0 votes
answered Aug 10, 2020 by Shawn (99,990 points)
There are no amount of dead bodies in space.

There have been 3 astronauts that have died while in space but the astronauts bodies were recovered and brought back to earth.

So that means there's no dead bodies or dead astronauts in space.

Also if the astronauts bodies were left in space floating around then eventually the dead body would decay much faster and basically disintegrate and degrade really fast as within a year or two.

When someone dies in space their body would be floating around in low Earth orbit (e.g. at the altitude of Hubble or of the ISS or of Tiangong), the small amount of atmospheric drag that exists at that altitude would cause the corpse's orbit to degrade with a timescale of a few years. It would then burn up and disintegrate in the Earth's atmosphere.

So the body of the astronaut would not just stay there for years and years and eventually there would be no dead body up there.

There could have been an astronaut that died years ago up in space and their body could've remained up there but the astronauts body would degrade and go away soon.

98,443 questions

94,802 answers

1,270 comments

6,992,750 users

...