Preserving Body Parts In Outer Space

[Photon Guy]

I believe that body parts can be preserved in certain condition, such as if placed in ice, so that in some cases severed limbs can even be reattached. I did once hear a story about a boy who got his finger chopped off in an accident involving an axe. They were able to reattach the finger which involved the use of leeches. I would imagine that they had to put his finger in ice to preserve it while they brought it to the hospital though. I was thinking though, what about body parts in space? Let's say you lose a finger for instance in space, would the environment of outer space be able to preserve it so that it could be reattached? 

[Moontanman]

Why would outer space be a better place to preserve/store body parts? 

[Bufofrog]

No, space would be terrible.  You would have a freeze dried body part.

[Phi for All]

It's about US$10,000 per pound to bring a payload into space, a finger weighs about 1/3 pound, so it's about $3333 vs the cost of dry ice.

[Sensei]

The human body contains water. Water has a density of 1 g/cm^3. Ice has a lower density 0.917 g/cm³ than water (which is why it floats on the surface of the ocean).

Attempting to freeze the body causes an increase in volume (each gram of water of 1 cm^3 is converted to ice crystals of ~ 1.09 cm^3 volume) and cells can be damaged. This is under normal pressure.

https://www.google.com/search?q=damage+of+cells+by+cryopreservation

However, there is a vacuum in space with almost no pressure.

What happens to water in such an environment can be seen in this video:

 

[mistermack]

1 hour ago, Sensei said:

Attempting to freeze the body causes an increase in volume (each gram of water of 1 cm^3 is converted to ice crystals of ~ 1.09 cm^3 volume) and cells can be damaged.

There is a tiny industry freezing peoples dead bodies after they die, in the almost cartain vain hope that they can be revived when the technology advances. 

They call it cryonics, and they use various methods to avoid the damaging ice crystals, including high speed freezing and non-toxic chemicals to infuse into the tissues, that prevent crystal growth. In theory that process could be done in space, or done on Earth and then moved to space for long-term storage at very low temperatures. 

The water boils in the video because the removal of pressure drops the boiling point past the current temperature. If the temperature is lowered before the pressure is reduced, you can avoid boiling the water at close to zero pressure. There are mountains made of water ice on celestial bodies, at close to zero pressure. The ice at very low temperature behaves like rock here on Earth. I think Pluto might be one that has water ice mountains. (not sure)