Your lungs would not explode, they would fill with a nice pink liquid. This is caused by a higher pressure inside the cells inside your lungs, This is actually a quite common ailment among high altitude climbers. Its fatal unless you can get the person to a lower altitude or inside a pressurized gamov bag. This is called Pulmonary Edema ther is also another version callled cereberal edema, which effects you brain. The astronauts would have pretty much vapourised due to heat before this would have effected them.

No clue what the crashing hard drives is on about, There a sealed unit with a little bubble that expands and contracts to take into account barometric pressure changes. What would cause them to crash at 0 barometric pressure. I know a laptop can work fine at over 8000 meters (Everest) unpressurized at about 100 below zero if you keep the batteries next to your body to keep them warm.
--

On Mon, 3 Feb 2003 14:40:53
 Tal wrote:
>Another problem with low pressure or high altitude are heat dissipation.
>The thinner the air is, they more you need to relay on radiation and
>less on convection.
>
>Tal
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: pic microcontroller discussion list
>> [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU] On Behalf Of Andy Kunz
>> Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 1:46 PM
>> To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [PIC]: Shuttle related question
>>
>>
>> Well, astronauts' lungs would explode at 0PSI too.  That's
>> why they are in a pressurized cabin.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> At 10:08 AM 2/3/03 -0600, you wrote:
>> >Nate Duehr wrote:
>> >> Watching downlink video, even I can see that laptop computers are
>> >> flown regularly as part of standard hardware.  What *are*
>> you talking
>> >> about?
>> >
>> >I have seen that, and I wondered about the hard drives. At
>> low absolute
>> >pressure, the disks would crash. I don't know what the
>> functional lower
>> >limit is for barometric pressure to maintain operation, but I would
>> >suspect it is at least a few PSI. Consequently, maybe they
>> use sealed
>> >hard drives on those computers, just in case? Or perhaps
>> they have more
>> >important things to worry about if they have to depressurize.
>> >
>> >--
>> >
>> >Mike Poulton
>> >mpoulton@mtptech.com
>> >MTP Technologies
>> >KC0LLX
>> >
>> >--
>> >http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
>> >ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.
>>
>> --
>> http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three
>> different ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.
>>
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
>ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.
>


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