Ruptured Space Suit? No Problem.

image via Wikipedia

If there has been anything that Hollywood has taught us, it's that a ruptured space suit is very bad news for anyone inside of it. The unfortunate person usually spends their last few seconds frantically waving in desperation before dying, except in the 2015 film The Martian.

Matt Damon survives being impaled in a space suit, and the explanation is a cheesy "my blood clogged the hole and I survived" throwaway line. Utterly ridiculous, until you realize its totally happened in real life. Well, except for the whole "while on Mars" thing.

image via Breakbang, FoxMovies, TheMoviesNob

Also, how many times do we have to rescue Matt Damon?!

Jerome "Jay" Apt was on his first space mission ever, STS-37, in 1991. The goal of the mission was to deploy the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory into orbit. Unfortunately, there was a little hiccup in that the antennae refused to deploy remotely on NASA's command.

image via Discovery

Sure, we can send people to the moon, but God forbid we get an antennae to work right.

Luckily, Apt, and fellow astronaut Jerry Ross were prepared and suited up to go outside and deploy the antennae themselves. It would be the first US spacewalk since the Challenger disaster, and came extremely close to being a disaster itself.

At some point during the extravehicular activity, the right-hand glove palm restraint on Apt's spacesuit worked its way loose to the point that it punched a hole through his suit straight into his hand. However, rather than abort the EVA due to his suit depressurizing, Apt continued with the mission as usual. The reason was Apt didn't even notice due to the combination of the restraint filling the hole and Apt's own blood sealing it; the end result was that the air pressure in his suit never changed.

image via ESA

Maybe he didn't notice because SPAAACE!

Apt was unaware of how close he had been to his death all the way until they were back in the shuttle taking the suit off when he noticed his bloody hand and a hole in his suit. At which point he probably chalked it up to the deal he presumably made with the devil before the mission.

image via OrbitExperience

The real-life sorta Matt Damon.

And with how accurate the film The Martian is, right down to the source of heat he used in the rover, it's not inconceivable to think that they took that plot point straight from NASA's documents.