Has Anyone Ever Been Lost in Space, and What Happened to the Body?

Space exploration is about to enter a totally new stage — so far, we have never witnessed such rapid progress, with talks about colonising other planets no longer looking like a sci-fi dream. Of course, the pace we observe now has not always been so rapid, and many astronauts have lost their lives paving their way to the stars. But has anyone ever been lost in space — as in, literally stranded? Fortunately, no — even though the 20th century has seen its share of tragedies, both during actual missions and at launch sites, while preparing for them.

Below, we will quickly mention the most notable incidents of astronauts lost in space missions, meaning that they’ve lost their lives on a job, and also explain what would happen to a human body in space assuming someone got lost for real.

Mission Death Toll or Astronauts Lost in Space Forever  

So far, a total of 18 astronauts lost their lives during space missions. The two most notable and massively covered tragedies are the space shuttle disasters  — Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Both times, the entire crew of seven astronauts lost their lives. The Challenger crash was particularly dramatic as the shuttle exploded seconds after launch — and the tragedy no one could anticipate at the time was live-streaming on TV.

Columbia disaster, which eventually led to program discontinuation, happened on the descent, after an otherwise successful mission. Even though the program was only discontinued in 2011, no shuttle took offer after seven more astronauts lost their lives in Columbia’s crash.

Shuttle tragedies sum up to 14 deaths, but what about the remaining four astronauts lost in space missions forever? Technically, these people were not astronauts but cosmonauts because they died during the USSR’s Soyuz missions. The first tragedy that ‘started’ the official space death statistics occurred in 1967 when the Soyuz-1 capsule, with Vladimir Komarov on board, failed to open its parachute system on descent and crashed to the ground.

Three more astronauts lost their lives on another Soyuz mission in 1971. This time, the capsule depressurised during descent and, as space news online magazine Orbital Today explains, all three astronauts died of suffocation because the USSR did not use pressurised suits or helmets at the time. Fortunately, both have become must-have mission equipment since then. 

Has anyone been lost in space and survived?

As already explained, no one has literally been lost, and all astronauts have been accounted for. However, a few incidents with happy endings did take place —one currently still in progress, but from the looks of it, there is no reason to worry about astronauts’ lives. In July 2024, two Boeing Starliner astronauts have been delayed on the ISS, and they may not be able to return until February.

A few other cases like this happened before, the latest one in early 2023, when one NASA and one Russian astronaut had to prolong their ISS stay due to technical reasons that prevented their timely return. Clearly, the current Starliner incident will also be resolved soon enough, just like before.

Extended ISS stay is one thing, but has anyone ever floated away in space? Yes, but that was more of a controlled manoeuvre. In 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless performed the first untethered spacewalk in history, floating 320 feet away from the Space Shuttle Challenger. He successfully returned to the shuttle after activating his spacesuit thrusters, and today, this technology is widely used on space missions —even though the good old tethers have not been discarded either.

What happens to the human body lost in space?

Even though nothing of the kind has happened to date, morbid curiosity makes us wonder — what happens to your body in space without a suit? Even though we have no factual proof of what would happen exactly, the theoretic answer doesn’t look too good, to put it mildly. First, space is a vacuum, and without atmospheric pressure, a body would start to swell — although it would never explode as some space movies would have us believe.

Second, space is an extremely cold environment, up to -270°C, which would cause almost instant freezing. And third, there is simply no oxygen out there, so an astronaut literally lost without a suit would suffocate in a matter of minutes. So far, it’s not clear which of these three factors would be the actual cause of death, but death would certainly occur — and it would be extremely quick, which is a relief if we even begin to consider the possibility of such a scenario.

To wrap up on a slightly positive note, have any bodies been found in space? After all, space agencies also experimented on animals, right? Fortunately, the answer here is also no — even though some animals lost their lives during those experiments, the death toll was not too high, and all the bodies were also accounted for. And we sincerely hope it will remain this way as we keep pushing the limits of our space science further! 

Author: Emma Thorpe