On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:54:24 -0800 (PST), bildan
wrote:

All pressure suits undergo extensive testing without a human inside
but sooner or later, someone has to put it on and test it in a
vacuum. I'm sure MIT is not careless. The Bio-Suit project is well
funded and peer reviewed.

Indeed... but experience shows that things go wrong with prototypes.
If such a suit fails at FL 350+, the pilot is dead if he doesn't have
a pressure cabin... I knew extrenely few pilots who willingly choose
to do without redundancy.

There's a good cause why any application of a pressure cabin up to
Rutan's Spaceship One relied on a pressure cabin with a pressure suit
(or, in the case of the XB-70, a second pressure cabin shell around
the pilot's seat) as backup system.


Explosive decompression to hard vacuum is something that has been
deliberately tested on large primates and by accident on a few
humans. The subject will survive a minute or so and, if pressure and
oxygen are restored within that time, will fully recover. It IS an
injury accident, and something to avoid at all costs, but not
necessarily fatal or even disabling.

Even if the pilot survived the first minute in near-vacuum:
The problem is that it is going to take a lot longer to reach a denser
athmosphere, even if you manage to bail out.