Flashlights in Space

This came up in the going to outer space thread by @Raccoon City, someone mentioned there is only radiative ability (outside the spacecraft).

I mentioned:

First thing that springs in my mind: do you even need a flashlight in space? There’s no night and day see. you’d need to go quite a distance before you’d loose the light of the sun.

Say you’d be strolling around on the dark side of the moon…., I heard it’s f…… unbelievable cold out of the sun so regular batteries will probably don’t work very well, on the other hand our turbo’s will last much longer so it’s not all bad. :partying_face:

Well, spacesuits need heating and cooling to keep the astronaut alive in these extremes so it will probably be easiest to integrate a headlamp in the helmet or something like that.

Penlight style flashlights were included on the missions:

There was (is?) also a replica- Barbolight Apollo.

This.

If I were stuck in an airtight metal tube out in space, the last thing I would want to worry about is my lithium ion powered flashlight exploding and venting toxic gas all over. I’d definitely want Intrinsically Safe. And no lithium ion battery.

All I can say is if Bezos used an astrolux flashlight in space, astrolux sales would go through the roof.

Do you think a flashlight could even work in space?

There is no atmosphere in space—its vacuum and no sound waves can be heard or travel; and there is no gravity, its just black space with nothing there, no particles or waves to carry a light beam. You could push the button but nothing would happen… :student:

I prefer to use the saying; Sales would be sky high. :smiley:

I thought about this further and the one thing that comes to mind is that outside a spacecraft the light will quickly drop to incredibly far below freezing. I doubt a lithium or alkaline or NiMH battery will work well if at all.
You would probably need to keep the light warm, not care about heatsinking.

I like.

Doesn’t light have to reflect off of something? I guess if you point it at your space craft, it would illuminate the space craft but if you point it to space, you really would not even know it was on.

Yes but if you point it into space what are you trying to light up?

That would be a perfect application of an LEP light, put a hot spot on Jupiter while standing on the moon.

All this time, I though LEP did not have any useful purpose.

The range is insufficient.

What would happen if you were driving slightly faster then the speed of light and you turned the headlights on? The guy behind you would think you were backing up.

You now have 1704 posts, 3 less and you could have claimed to be the Enterprise travelling slightly faster than the speed of light :smiley:

What? Aether theory was left behind at the start of the 20th century after Einstein’s relatively theory was verified. How do you think sunlight reaches us after travelling 150 millions kilometers (90 millions miles) of vacuum?

You won’t have the nice beams from atmosphere interaction that flashalcholics like so much, but light will reflect from objects like that spaceship module you are repairing just fine. Air refraction index is very close to 1 so anything that works on refraction should keep working fine.