NASA astronaut protocol they have to follow if someone dies while in space

Let’s be honest, every now and again we think about what will go down when we go down.

Perhaps you’ve imagined how your death will happen, when it will happen or what will happen afterwards.

But it’s likely none of those scenarios involve you being in space, and while it’s not exactly really something we need to consider, it is for NASA.

Because sure, it might not be a common thing but there’s always that tiny chance of someone passing away while they’re away from Earth.

So, the space agency does have a protocol for astronauts to follow in case someone does die in space.

It would be pretty inconvenient (Getty Stock)

Astronaut and former commander of the International Space Station (ISS), Chris Hadfield, explained NASA even runs ‘death simulations’ with astronauts to lay out the scenarios.

“If someone died while on an EVA [extravehicular activity] I would bring them inside the airlock first,” Hadfield said to Popular Science of his conclusion from one of these exercises.

“I would probably keep them inside their pressurised suit; bodies actually decompose faster in a spacesuit, and we don’t want the smell of rotting meat or off gassing, it’s not sanitary. So we would keep them in their suit and store it somewhere cold on the station.”

While onboard the ISS, this could all be dealt with swiftly with the body being temporarily stored in a cooler area before the ‘final disposition of remains’.

NASA’s guidance for ‘Mortality Related to Human Spaceflight’ explains the ISS Program responsible for ‘the final determination of remains disposition’.

It adds: “For a crew fatality occurring on the ISS, options would be limited to the return of remains, jettison to a disposal trajectory, or destructive re-entry."

The crew’s wishes would also be taken into account if a death was to go down.

Basically, just avoid it (Getty Stock)

You might think that you could just drop the body from the spacecraft into space and turn that astronaut into some space debris. However, this would go against a UN space mitigation agreement and that would cause a whole other headache.

With space cool enough for a human body to be stored in an appropriate way that’s safe for the other astronauts pretty limited, a research team at NASA suggested an alternative.

The corpse would be place in a bag, held on to the spaceship by a robotic arm. This would end up freezing solid before it then gets vibrated for 15 minutes to reduce the body to pieces.

But say you end up dying on the moon’s surface, you wouldn’t decompose like you would on Earth and contaminating other parts of the Solar System is a big no-no for NASA. The space agency would prefer for the body to be taken back to Earth.

Basically, it’s all a bit of a nightmare and would be a whole lot easier to save your death for home ground.