Ridiculous space travel question

[crodery]

First off, hello everyone, I'm Clay, and I'm stoked to be a part of the community here!

 

I have a fairly weird question, but hopefully you can help me out with it. I'm wondering about smoking cigarettes in a spacecraft. Great first post huh? I'm asking because I'm an illustrator, and I'm currently involved in developing a short story which follows an astronaut traveling through space on a long journey. It deals with the psychology of being utterly isolated, and just because it's visually representative of that sort of melancholia, one of the images I aim to create for the story is this spaceman passing the time having a smoke. I know there's quite a bit of physics that get in the way of such a thing happening. Lack of convection currents to allow slow burning, the obvious danger of a pure oxygen environment, etc. However I am wondering, could some kind of device be put onto a spacecraft that would make up for these environmental inadequacies that might allow for such a thing? I've already established that there's artificial gravity, as that's a staple of sci-fi, so obviously there's no reason to be hindered by our present state of technology. I know how asinine thsi all sounds, but any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Klaynos]

Firstly the atmosphere would not be pure oxygen, that'd probably kill the crew, even if it didn't explode...

 

Secondly, and more to the point of the post, as you've got artificial gravity that means you would have a density distribution across the height of the room and then there would also be areas of different temperatures (if only due to the crew and you need to stop them freezing to death) so this would mean you'd have convection currents... I don't know of any other problems other than oxygen being valuable and therefore fire == bad because it uses it...

[Mr Skeptic]

First of all, there's no way that smoking in space will be allowed any time soon. NASA already took a lot of flack from a report of a drunk astronaut, and I doubt that anyone would approve of spending our tax dollars so an astronaut can take a smoke. Apart from the health and political issues, it would also be a bad idea practically. The smoke would have to be specially filtered out, and its using precious oxygen for little reason (you have to take the oxygen there still, I think). A cigarette would not actually have the problem of convection currents that a regular fire would have because the smoker would be sucking air through it. So it would be much like a regular cigarette except that the smoke cloud would not go up and the air will need cleaning.

[Sayonara]

First of all, there's no way that smoking in space will be allowed any time soon. NASA already took a lot of flack from a report of a drunk astronaut, and I doubt that anyone would approve of spending our tax dollars so an astronaut can take a smoke.

The brief Clay gave doesn't mention NASA - it's for a work of fiction which for all we know might not even feature Earth, never mind contemporary organisations. Assume for the sake of argument that this particular astronaut on his long voyage does smoke, whether or not the regs say he can.

[zule]

It could be in the spacecraft a smoking room perfectly isolated from the rest. So, you only have to clean the air of that room.

[Realitycheck]

You could make your own smoke and put into a tank and then smoke it by using a ventilator. You would have to exhale into another receptacle and then you would still have to change the air filters every now and then. All in all, sounds like a really smoky experience, but to each his own.

[swansont]

However I am wondering, could some kind of device be put onto a spacecraft that would make up for these environmental inadequacies that might allow for such a thing?

 

A fan?

 

But, as Klaynos has already pointed out, once you have artificial gravity these problems go away. The acceleration of "I can't believe it's not gravity™" is guaranteed to be indistinguishable from the real thing by the Einstein equivalence principle.