Thrown Out the Airlock

One giant leap for mankind.

"You know, I hear tell they used to keelhaul traitors back in the day. I don't have a keel to haul you on, so..."

— Captain Mal Reynolds, Firefly, "Ariel"

Throwing someone out a spacecraft or orbital space station's airlock without a spacesuit, or as some universes call it, "spacing", or simply "airlocking", is a common method of killing someone in science fiction works involving space travel. This one is usually reserved as a last-ditch effort to get rid of a bad guy, though certain Captains (especially Space Pirates) have been known to use this as a method of execution. By all accounts, getting exposed to the hard vacuum of space is not a pleasant way to die, and the effects of this on the body are covered in much more detail on the Explosive Decompression page. A somewhat crueler version involves giving the executed a spacesuit with enough air to let them last a while so they can fully appreciate their upcoming death.

An odd bit of Hollywood Science regarding getting Thrown Out the Airlock is that it always causes the victim to be violently "sucked" out into space (actually blown, as it's the atmospheric gasses leaving under pressure that pushes objects out, like how air blows out of a punctured tire from the pressure inside rather than sucked out by the lower pressure outside the tire). In Real Life, a pressure difference of a single atmosphere would not cause very much explosive force and would happen almost instantly rather than cause the prolonged gale-force winds that seems to always happen in the movies. Granted, there would be a rather fast stream when the cover starts to open, but by the time it opens enough for someone to exit, the wind slows down (and the pressure drops). As airlocks are, in the vast majority of cases, intended for scenarios other than "jump out before the ship explodes", they will likely be designed to minimize air loss. This includes having air lock chambers as small as possible and some foolproof measures to ensure that both doors of the sluice will not open at once. Which means there's simply not enough air to have a long wind. Also, there's no reason to give any airlock a powerful instantly-opening door if it's not an evacuation exit or torpedo tube — it's more likely to have the air slowly pumped out (or, more likely, pumped back into the ship) before opening. We don't want those maintenance guys to drop crates every time they exit, right?

This trope also covers instances where the character is not thrown out an airlock, but a hole is made in the hull through which the character is pulled out into the vacuum of space.

See The Coconut Effect and Reality Is Unrealistic. Appropriate, given that Space Is an Ocean, and parallels can be drawn with keelhauling or walking the plank. Note that the loss of oxygen from the ship's system will never be a problem no matter how much you do it. May result in Dramatic Space Drifting, and may be a form of Sinister Suffocation.

Since this is a Death Trope, beware of spoilers.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cowboy Bebop:
  • As detailed on the Explosive Decompression page, Spike jumps out of an airlock himself in "Heavy Metal Queen".
  • In "Toys in the Attic", Spike spaces a rogue refrigerator. Notably, the Hollywood Science aspects of the trope are averted as the target has to be physically kicked out of the ship when air movement proves insufficient to do the job.
  • In "Black Dog Serenade", after a bunch of criminals take control of a prison ship, one of them opens a door to an area of the ship, unaware that there's a hole in the ship's hull on the other side.
• Benten of Cyber City Oedo 808 tries this against the main bad guy of his focus episode, who is a vampire. It doesn't work.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • King Cold gets infuriated by one of his minions suggesting that Frieza didn't survive Namek's explosion and shatters a window to get the minion blown into space. The minion actually survives this.
  • In Resurrection 'F', a revived Frieza does this to Tagoma after he suggests that he forget about getting revenge on Goku. He doesn't do this in the Dragon Ball Super version.
• Happens in the original Gaiking series, to the wife of an alien enemy some time before their daughter is shot to death and he's brainwashed into becoming Darius's minion.
• Gundam:
  • Victory Gundam:
  • The "thrown into space in a spacesuit with a few days' worth of air" version was applied to Dark Action Girl Fuala Griffon, apparently a punishment for failure in Zanscare more "honorable" than the guillotine. She was rescued just cutting her suit open on the orders of the local Starscream, Tassilo Vargo, but her almost nonexistent mental stability was fully gone by that point.
    • Whenever the Angel Halo fortress was hit in the Grand Finale, many of the "psycickers" inside of it (Newtypes acting as the "power batteries" for the Halo itself) got thrown into space without spacesuits and died.
  • In the backstory of Mobile Fighter G Gundam, Canada's future Gundam Fighter Andrew Graham lost his wife Norma to decompression during an attack by Space Pirates lead by Russia's future Gundam Fighter, Argo Gulskii. Though Argo was actually trying to save her, but wasn't fast enough to do so; in the story proper, he blames himself heavily for Norma's death.
  • In Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam a variation of this trope, Kamille' mother is held hostage in a sealed glass case in space in exchange for mobile suits; When his attempt to rescue her fails, case is shattered by gunfire and she is spaced in a vacuum.
• Irresponsible Captain Tylor. "The Day the Soyokaze Vanished". The ship is haunted by the ghost of the previous captain, who killed himself out of grief when several members of his crew committed suicide by jumping out the airlock; he tries to make Captain Tylor follow suit.
• In Legend of the Blue Wolves, a flashback shows that this is how Leonard's younger brother died.
• This is what happened to Kaoru's rival Louis in the backstory of Mujin Wakusei Survive. Up to this day, the survivor Kaoru isn't happy about it.
• In Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Hikaru, Max, and Ben board the Zentradi command ship in order to rescue a captured recon plane with Misa on board. In the fighting, they manage to blast a hole in the ship's hull and blow the Zentraedi's commander Breetai out of his own ship. It doesn't take. Breetai manages to grab onto the ship and make his way back on board before beating all three pilots and their mecha down.
• In Trigun, a human who bullied Rem, Vash, and Knives and tried to kill the twins dies like this.
• In the backstory of Trinity Blood, Cain gets thrown out an airlock by his siblings. Not only does he survive being spaced, he (eventually) recovers from re-entering Earth's atmosphere. From space.

Comic Books

• Mystek of the Justice League Task Force was thrown out an airlock due to a tag-team combo of Executive Meddling and the resulting Creator Breakdown. As writer Christopher Priest explains at his website:
  We eventually introduced a character named Mystek, but I killed her off when her miniseries was not approved. Mystek was supposed to be a creator-owned character, developed under a first-look deal, and I was instructed to put her into JLTF to introduce her to the fans in preparation for her miniseries. Then there was no series, so I shoved her out an airlock in JLTF #32.
• Parodied in the first MAD Star Trek parody "Star Blecch" In 1967. Kirk tries to solve the problems of the alien of the week by having him "accidentally" slip on a banana peel out a porthole.
• Star Trek (IDW): Kirk threatens to do this to an uncooperative Vulcan science officer in the "Vulcan's Vengeance" arc.
• Star Wars:
  • In Star Wars (Marvel 1977), one story has Darth Vader giving an admiral one of his famous performance reviews aboard the "Tarkin" (Death Star superlaser without the Death Star). He tells the admiral to go for a walk in the "fresh air." Later, a tech notices an airlock cycling all by itself. Vader: "How curious. A faulty mechanism, no doubt."
  • Star Wars: Darth Vader: Doctor Aphra knows that Vader would kill her once she is no longer needed and thus requests him to not throw her into outer space, saying it terrifies her more than death by lightsaber. Vader being Vader of course decides to mercilessly throw her out of the airlock, which she anticipated and thus has Black Krrasantan and the killer droids stationed outside to pick her up once the Executor is out of sight.
  • Star Wars: Doctor Aphra: After being captured by one of Domina Tagge's bounty hunters, Aphra is threatened with this fate to keep her in line, prompting her to wonder why people keep threatening her with this. Later on, she uses this very technique to get rid of a swarm of dangerous parasites (and Durge, whom she used as bait for them).
• In Superman storyline The Killers of Krypton, Empress Gandelo punishes Harry Hokum's failure by getting him thrown out of her spaceship.
• In the Tintin story "Explorers on the Moon", Wolff commits suicide by airlock so the others have enough oxygen to make it back to Earth. It is also strongly implied that the corpse of villainous henchman Jorgen is left in space after he is shot dead in a struggle with Wolff.
• In the What If? story "What if Professor X became the Juggernaut?", Cyclops is forced to do this to defeat Xavier with Uatu noting in bitter irony the Juggernaut's usual catchphrase of nothing stopping the Juggernaut.
• X-23 has the "give them just enough air" variation done to her by an intergalactic pack rat who wants to add her adamantium claws, Hellion's metal hands, and the Richards kids to his collection. He sends her out in a spacesuit with an insufficient power and oxygen supply to retrieve the kids when they're accidentally spaced (the kids are protected by life support pods), fully intending for her to die from vacuum exposure so he could retrieve her claws afterwards. Just as he planned, the space suit (actually a device that projects an energy shield around her body to maintain oxygen and pressure) runs out of power once she reaches the kids, and in short order Laura succumbs to vacuum exposure. Unfortunately, he failed to account for Valeria's genius, Julian's telekinesis, and Laura's own Healing Factor. Laura is successfully rescued and quickly puts an end to his plot.
• X-Men:
  • As part of a plan to fight aliens with 'bring one back to life' über-technology, Cyclops of the X-Men throws himself out an airlock into space and dies. Intentionally. Knowing he lacks (and will lack) access to his powers. That's how much of a badass he is.
  • The Brood Saga: Kitty Pryde gets cornered by a Brood while Nightcrawler is left floating out the vacuum of space. Though she's never killed before she decides to save herself and her friend, going intangible and blowing the lock to send the Brood to its doom.
  • Sins of Sinister: In Immoral X-Men #3, 900 years into their mission, Rasputin IV discovers that her mentor Sinister has been lying to her all along. She's his finest creation, with a wide range of mutant powers - but she can't fly. So, as he can't beat her in a fight, Sinister simply opens the ships' airlock and dumps her into space, then leaves in their ship. Rasputin's internal monologue notes that she may take days or weeks to die.
  • Abigail Brand does this to Henry Peter Gyrich in the final issue of S.W.O.R.D. (2020). She claims afterward he comitted suicide despite her efforts to stop him. Nobody really buys it, but he was so awful they don't press her.

Fan Works

• In A Colder War, when Steve Rogers and Tony Stark discover that astronaut Shipley has been essentially possessed by the essence of the Red Skull, they defeat Schmidt by opening the airlock of the space shuttle before he can force them to take him back to Earth.
• Rocketship Voyager
  • The Maquis prisoners that Voyager is transporting back to Earth are kept suspended in cargo webbing above the cargo-loading hatches.
    Opening the hatches to the vacuum of Space would be one solution. It was time to find another.
  • The crew encounter Nee'Lix when he's literally dumped on them by a passing convoy of alien spacecraft, who throw him out the airlock in a leaking Organic Technology pod. Fortunately they're curious enough to grapple the pod and bring it on board.

Films — Animated

• Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders: The Joker, Penguin, and Riddler attempt to dispose of Catwoman by jettisoning her through the airlock on the space station.
• Used at the end of a segment in Heavy Metal, when Captain Sternn pulls a lever and sends Hanover Fiste out of a space station airlock. Fiste subsequently catches fire in the vacuum of space. Or he might have burned up on reentry, if you're feeling charitable. (Word of God is that it was supposed to be on atmospheric entry, but they ran out of money and couldn't make the planned bridge to the next segment. It was meant to show the way the Lohknar Fiste was holding affected the development of the planet that the next segment occurred on.)
• In Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, during the part where the Yolkians find Jimmy's 'toaster', the one who delivered it to the King was 'spaced' because he entered the throne room unannounced.
• This is how Scroop kills Mr. Arrow in Disney's Treasure Planet. Later, Jim kills Scroop the same way as revenge for Mr. Arrow's murder. Technically, it was into a black hole, as space in the Treasure Planet universe has air.
• In Jonny Quest vs. the Cyber Insects, Jonny and Race kill most of the bug army by opening the door of the asteroid hangar, sucking them all into space.
• Used in Transformers: The Movie, where the heavily damaged Decepticons were thrown out into space so that Astrotrain could...well, it was bad physics, but they needed to lose weight to reach Cybertron even though they were already in space. Naturally, being machines, this didn't immediately kill them, but it was implied that eventually their batteries would run dry or they'd drift into a sun. Unicron had other plans for them.
• Almost done to Eve and WALL•E from WALL•E, though they manage to stay in the ship with the timely help from M-O. Of course given that they already were in space five minutes or so before, this would not have been lethal.

Films — Live-Action

• In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 kills Frank Poole by maneuvering his space pod and using the gripper arms while he is on EVA to replace the AE-35 unit. David Bowman rushes out in another pod to rescue his fellow astronaut, but in his haste neglects to take a helmet for his pressure suit. When HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors so Bowman can reenter Discovery, since Bowman lacks a helmet, he has to throw himself out of the airlock in order to regain entry into the spaceship. He is able to open the outer door of the airlock with the gripper arms, but the pod hatch does not mate with the door completely. Bowman blows the explosive bolts on the hatch, tucks down, and is blown into the airlock. In seconds, he is able to shut the outer door manually and repressurize the airlock. Although this scene is perfectly plausible, despite Explosive Decompression, Bowman inhales and holds his breath right before the hatch blows, which is the wrong thing to do. Arthur C. Clarke reportedly said that if he had been on the set that day, he would have corrected this.
• Alien:
  • Alien and Aliens end with the xenomorph getting blown out a ship's airlock.
  • In Alien: Resurrection, the monster is not simply shoved bodily out of an airlock, but blown into the vacuum of space through a small broken port window. It was not pretty.
• In Apollo 13, during the scene where Jack is reactivating the Command Module, we briefly glimpse a piece of paper over a panel in the cockpit, simply marked "NO!". When Lovell later asks him about this, Jack admits that he'd been getting "punchy" and put that on to keep himself from accidentally jettisoning the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) while the other two were still in it.
  Jim: [deadpan] Good thinking.
  • Incidentally, this was not something the film writers made up; it actually happened during the real life Apollo 13 mission (the note thing, not the jettisoning).
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Austin Powers ejects Mini-Me from a moonbase toilet into the void of space. He recovers just fine after Dr. Evil retrieves him.
• Avengers: Infinity War: Ebony Maw dies when Iron Man, prompted by Spider-Man and his knowledge of the Alien examples above, smashes a hole through the hull of Maw’s ship so that he’s sucked out into space. Doctor Strange nearly suffers the same fate, but Spider-Man manages to catch him and drag him back inside while Iron Man seals the hull breach.
• The Cloverfield Paradox
  • A variation when Tam is trapped in an airlock filling with water; the water pressure buckles the outer hatch, but instead of everything being blown out into space the water flash-freezes, Tam along with it.
  • During a Gun Struggle between Jensen and Ava, a bullet is fired through the space station window. Jensen is sucked up against it momentarily sealing the breach, but then the glass cracks and she is blown out into space.
• Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. In "Chapter 2: Atomic Peril", Commando Cody is threatened with being thrown out the decompression chamber hatch of his rocketship if he doesn't help its hijackers fly it. As the Film Serial was shown in The '50s, some exposition was required regarding this trope. It implies they'll let Cody keep his Space Mask, which would be worse than straight-out spacing him.
  "We will simply throw you overboard when we're out of Earth's gravity. You won't fall, you will simply...float around in space, from now on."
• In the 1972 low-budget sci-fi film Doomsday Machine, two crew members are killed this way by unlocking the airlock by accident (thanks to an easily pressed button) during an attempted rape. They're not actually blown out into space, but remain in the airlock and die of suffocation, as well as bleeding from every orifice. Not a pretty way to go.
• Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, albeit in the Earth's atmosphere rather than outer space. The aliens have been keeping two prisoners on board their Flying Saucer, but dump them from high altitude in retaliation after one of their own has been killed.
• In Event Horizon, Justin almost kills himself messily this way when the ship possesses him.
• Happens to a couple of alien mooks in Galaxy Quest, prompting Tony Shalhoub's character to mention that the door was a little sticky and he'd send a couple of his boys up with a can of WD-40. A few scenes later, he beams the Rock Monster from a nearby planet up to the ship; the monster tears through the corridors before smashing through the hull, taking several more mooks with it.
• Fortress 2: Re-Entry: Several prisoners are executed in this manner, blown out into space after being forced into the chemical waste disposal. Brennick himself survives being spaced by floating towards another exit that was nearby.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. After the crew mutiny against Yondu, they gleefully throw his Number One into the airlock and jeer at him as he floats off into space. A Reveal Shot then shows a number of other Yondu loyalists drifting in space with him.
• Subverted in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) movie: Prefect and Dent stand in the Vogon airlock while klaxons sound, facing the standard giant, ominous-looking space door, waiting for it to open and send them to their doom. Nothing happens. Then a tiny and inconspicuous Trap Door opens under them instead.
• In Interstellar, TARS jokes about doing this to the crew. This winds up being Mann's ultimate fate — he tries to open an airlock door while the outer door hasn't been properly sealed. The resulting Explosive Decompression sends him flying out the airlock, though he's likely already dead from the impact of the hatch hitting him.
• Jupiter Ascending: In a moment of Bond Villain Stupidity, Titus not only attempts to dispose of Caine in this matter once he's outlived his usefulness rather than order his drones to shoot, but reveals his plot to Caine before doing so. Caine survives because Titus forgets that there are spare spacesuits in the airlock.
• The Last Days on Mars (2013). The final Zombie Infectee is killed this way, when the last two survivors make it to orbit in the Drop Ship. A flashback shows that the hero nearly spaced himself during an attack of claustrophobia, only to be saved by the intervention of another crewmember.
• How the eponymous antagonist of Leprechaun 4: In Space gets defeated.
• In Men in Black 3, Boris shoots the ceiling of the Moon prison Lunar Max to let his guards be blown out of the hole... along with the would-be girlfriend that freed him.
• Moonraker. Hugo Drax orders James Bond and Holly Goodhead thrown out the airlock after catching them sneaking around his Space Station, so it's Laser-Guided Karma when Bond sends him out the airlock after shooting Drax with a poison dart. It's the current page image.
• Parodied in National Lampoon's Men in White where the protagonist finds a button on the arm of the chair he's strapped to labelled "Push this if your name is Ripley" which blasts the villain out an airlock and releasing our hero after it closes.
• The Sean Connery movie Outland features a doped-up asteroid miner doing this to himself in the opening minutes.
• Passengers (2016): Jim nearly does this to himself after he becomes depressed from being alone. Apparently, there's nothing to stop someone going into the airlock without putting on a space suit and opening it.
• Downplayed in Rubikon. When Gavin tries to commit suicide after realising the Fog of Doom has caused The End of the World as We Know It, he just steps into the airlock and vents it. The others have to get the airlock to reset before they can increase the pressure and open the door. Later Gavin succeeds in killing himself this way, so his companions open the outer door to give him a Burial in Space.
• A Martian tries to do this to Santa and the kids in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians; it doesn't work. Note that Santa escapes from the airlock through the ventilation duct.
• Saturn3: Captain James is scheduled to bring a prototype robot to the remote research station on Saturn's moon. While changing into his pressure suit, he talks with Benson, who'd flunked the "psych test." Benson wordlessly buckles himself into an emergency alcove, then opens an airlock in the ceiling of the locker room. This blows poor Captain James out into space. Benson then assumes the captain's identity, and continues the mission in his place.
• Star Trek:
  • Though not technically through an airlock, a nameless female officer gets spaced through a hull breach in Star Trek (2009).
  • This also happens to James T. Kirk at the beginning of Star Trek: Generations. Of course, he was just hiding in the Nexus, and they brought him back to drop a bridge on him.
  • In Star Trek Into Darkness, this happens again to several crewmembers, who are blown out of a hull breech... at warp. Not a nice way to go.
  • Scotty does this to a Giant Mook holding him at phaser point, blowing the hatch just as Harrison and Kirk come flying into the airlock wearing spacesuit jetpacks, narrowly missing him.
  • Star Trek Beyond has several crew members sucked out of hull breaches made by Krall's swarm ships. McCoy and Spock also use this trick to remove the passengers of a swarm ship they commandeer. Twice. Then in the climax, Kirk kills Krall this way.
  • In Star Trek: Nemesis, The Bridge takes a hit during the battle; one poor Red Shirt gets spaced before a forcefield seals the breach. Later on, Data spaces himself so he can traverse the distance between the Enterprise and the Scimitar; as an android, he can survive a vacuum for extended periods.
• Star Wars:
  • General Grievous does this to himself in Revenge of the Sith, but in order to escape the Jedi (he can survive in space, and had a grappling hook that allowed him to reattach to the ship). Blast panels come down soon after to prevent others from getting blown out.
  • Happens to much of the Resistance leadership in The Last Jedi after a TIE Fighter attack destroys the bridge of their flagship. Leia survives by using The Force, but is in critical condition afterwards.
• There are three notable airlock scenes in Sunshine.
  • In the first, Icarus Two has decoupled from Icarus One, wrenching the airlock open. There's only one spacesuit, and with no means of repressurizing the damaged airlock, they can't just send over more suits. Capa (the person most critical to the mission) is placed inside the spacesuit while the others wrap themselves in thermal insulation. With two men holding onto Capa's spacesuit, the door is opened (manually by a crew member who has to stay behind) and the outrush of air blasts them in the direction of Icarus Two's airlock, which is twenty metres away. One crew member strikes part of the spaceship and is knocked free of their grasp; the others survive.
  • In the second incident, Capa is locked in Icarus Two's airlock by mad Captain Pinbacker. Capa burns a hole in the inside door with an oxy torch (kept in the airlock as part of the EVA repair kit), then straps himself to the wall and fires the explosive bolts in the outside door. The force of the air inside the spaceship trying to escape through the small hole is enough to wrench the inside door off its hinges.
  • Plus there's a third airlock incident not long after this. Capa has just separated the payload from Icarus II and is making his way to the airlock when he trips in his heavy spacesuit. The boosters will fire in four minutes; he is able to get to his feet again, but the payload has already separated. He must leap from one airlock to the other and climb inside before the boosters fire.

Literature

By Author:

• Robert A. Heinlein uses this in:
  • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, except that the airlock is for the city's pressure enclosure, not on a ship.
  • Rocket Ship Galileo: one of the heroes threatens to do this to a Nazi prisoner to get him to talk. He has to partially carry it out before the Nazi cracks.
  • The Rolling Stones (1952), but here it is a trope used by various family members when plotting and writing scripts for a successful commercial space opera serving as an income source for the family, the original scripts having been written by the Grandma character Hazel Meade Stone.
  • Time Enough for Love, Lazarus Long tells a story of how he ended up staying years — long enough for his sons to be grow up enough to help him with mechanical work — on a planet because the government confiscated his ship, and it took that long to make enough money to buy it back. Also, that planet is a slaver planet, where slavery and slave trading are legal, something Lazarus detests, badly. So, when he's about to leave, the Protector of Servants (the Chief Slave Overseer for the planetary government's slave management department) gets suspicious when Lazarus and his entire family decide to do a "pre-flight inspection" (before slaves are loaded), and tags along to the inspection, probably suspicious they might not pay all taxes owed before leaving. Lazarus takes off almost immediately after everyone is aboard, and jettisons anything and everything out of the ship that would indicate it was prepared to be used for carrying slaves. Asked about the Protector of Servants, he says, "I ''spaced the bastard! Alive. He went thataway, eyes popped out and peeing blood. What did you expect me to do? Kiss him?"

By Work:

• In Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, Walter Curnow claims that this is the official punishment for falling asleep on-duty. He's presumed to be joking, though, as the narrative then observes that such a punishment would've left the Leonov crew sadly short-handed.
• The Algebraist, by Iain Banks. A Galactic Conqueror wants the cooperation of an alien species, so proceeds to space hundreds of men, women and children from the human colony he's just conquered, immobilised yet fully conscious. Unfortunately the aliens have Blue-and-Orange Morality, so their response amounts to: "Yes, and what do this have to do with us?"
• Animorphs:
  • In the fourth book, two Controllers are overheard saying the Visser has been receiving some distant thought-speak messages (the same ones Cassie and Tobias have been hearing, which turns out to be Ax on the ocean floor), and had a Hork-Bajir thrown out the airlock for breaking his concentration.
  • The Visser's host Alloran is even worse. In The Andalite Chronicles, he finds thousands of helpless hostless Yeerks in a transport they're sneaking up on. Alloran not only wants to space them, but tries to force rookie Elfangor to do it as a lesson in war. Elfangor refuses and the opportunity passes. Alloran's response? Forgo retrieving the Time Matrix in favor of hiding out for days morphing and demorphing watching the ship for the chance to do it again. And he very nearly gets his wish. He does make Elfangor toss a single Hork-Bajir out the airlock (albeit in atmosphere, not that it matters at their altitude). Elfangor himself spaces a starving Yeerk later (in stasis to spare it starving to death, but he does make sure to eject it close to a star...) Finally, the newly promoted Visser Thirty-two (now in Alloran's head, ironically) is almost a victim of it when he tries to board Elfangor's ship, leaving the lot of them on a depowered vessel heading for a black hole.
  • Actually happens at the end, where Jake orders the 17,000 Yeerks in the Yeerk Pool ship to be flushed. The act is given all of the full gravity and horror that it deserves.
• Features in a couple of Boojumverse stories. In "Boojum", Captain Song used this as punishment for a former crew member named James Brady. In "The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward", this is the fate that Cynthia faces if she is unable to find a way to pay her oxygen tax (she's on a Space Station).
• Used in Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations". In this specific instance, contra the general rule above, the air lost due to the spacing would probably have been closely calculated since the girl needs to be spaced or the ship won't make it to its destination.
• In the climax of The Memory of Sky — A Great Ship novel — Quest inadvertently activates the Hollow World's purge system, extinguishing the Endless Daytime as the world comes to end by floor opening up to the vacuum of outer space. The purge is stopped, but not before entire Tree Top Town cities die and plunge to the floor of the world.
• Honor Harrington: Using this method of execution is rightly regarded as an unforgivable atrocity. Pirates do it regularly, of course (there is NO romanticisation of piracy in that universe).
  • Slavers one-up them with ships designed to efficiently space every prisoner aboard in the event of boarding or mutiny. Just getting caught with such a ship — regardless of any evidence that it's ever actually carried slaves — is enough to be shot. A slaver ship's true purpose is impossible to hide from the inside, so if they're boarded and don't have a cargo of slaves they're assumed to have spaced them beforehand and as such are automatically guilty of mass-murder. In the book where this is stated, one slaver captain, while flying without a cargo, muses that it would be better to get caught with a full load of slaves; slaving will just get the whole crew life in prison, whereas being charged with mass-murder will get them all shot on the spot.
  • A few of the "Good Guys" feel that spacing pirates is appropriate, as something of a retribution; the rest, however, feel these people are treading severely into Knight Templar territory. One captain in the series promises to kick a bunch of pirates out an airlock, and is met with horrified reactions until he clarifies that of course he'll shoot them first. The airlock is just a fittingly callous way of disposing of their worthless bodies; spacing living people is too cruel to inflict on anyone.
    • Indeed, he considers putting a pulser dart in their heads an act of mercy that the pirates don't deserve. Granted, what the pirates had done to a pair of Manticoran merchants would be enough to make anyone want to show them the door.
  • On the other hand, it is seen as a perfectly acceptable way to take out your opponent during combat. In "Crown of Slaves", Solarian Marines blow holes in the walls of Manpower's orbital facilities around Congo, with the results for the non-suited people inside (as the book puts it) "as ghastly as they were predictable". These tactics were planned and approved by both a Solarian Marines Lieutenant Colonel and Manticore's Commander Oversteegen. Several of the anti-slaver people who watch the carnage thoroughly enjoy the slaver's death agonies, reflecting on how many slaves died the same way.
• In Jack McDevitt's Infinity Beach, Solly tries to blow the Shroud out of the Hammersmith's airlock, explaining that he Saw It in a Movie Once. But unlike in Alien, it doesn't work.
• In the Jacob's Ladder Trilogy, it's stated that some inhabitants of the ship perform executions in this manner — but the victims are tied to tethers so their bodies can be reeled back in afterwards, because the ship's resources are so precious that every corpse must be recycled.
• In the Lensman series, Boskone-affiliated pirates routinely space the crews and passengers of ships that resist capture. (Except for any post-pubescent females, of course.)
• The Motie miner encountered in The Mote in God's Eye does this with his passengers, for reasons which become an important plot point later on. There is a later variation when Horace Bury kills the Watchmakers by breaking their faceplate during the crossing to Lenin.
• The Murderbot Diaries. In "Fugitive Telemetry", bounty hunters capture a module used to smuggle refugees from Indentured Servitude and fasten it to the outside of their spacecraft. When Murderbot boards to rescue them, it's horrified to realise the module's cargo hatch is open and sealed directly to the hull of the spacecraft, so all the bounty hunters have to do is unlock the seal to space everyone inside and dispose of the evidence. Which they try to do, but Murderbot has hacked the bot pilot. When they try to use the manual control, Murderbot just remotely opens the hatch to the module along with every internal door so doing so would decompress the entire ship.
• Played straight in George R. R. Martin's sci-fi horror story Nightflyers. Two passengers on the eponymous spaceship try to find out more about their mysterious and unseen captain by hacking into the ship's computer, only to have an Oh, Crap! moment when they realize the corridor has just been sealed and the cargo-loading hatch above their heads is opening. As they're traveling at superlight speed, the resulting explosion rips them apart and causes major damage to the ship. The survivors correctly assume that this was no accident.
• Neuromancer has Armitage killed this way by Wintermute after his previous personality of Colonel Willis Corto reemerges and proves to be uncontrollable.
• Orbital Lily: Maria Nova ejects one of her imagined rivals out the airlock.
• RCN: In the fourth book a paranoid Captain uses this as a punishment for three men he accuses of mutiny, it's ambiguous how accurate a claim this was. As these three men included the ship's bosun and a Midshipman who was the son of a senator this causes riots among the common people and is massively unpopular among the enlisted members of the RCN setting off the plot.
• The Red Vixen Adventures: "I Fought the Claw and the Claw Won" starts with Greycoat about to be spaced and reflecting on how he ended up like that. In the end, Melanie decides to indenture him to a brothel instead. And earlier in Captive of the Red Vixen, Melanie almost seemed to mention spacing some of the psychopaths in her ship's original crew when she became captain.
• Revelation Space Series: In Chasm City, two incompetent medics accused of causing the death of their captain are executed this way, with the air being slowly vented from the airlock to increase their suffering. Actually, it was the Villain Protagonist who murdered the captain, simply taking advantage of the men's carelessness.
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin manages to use the trope despite being a fantasy setting (the cause of death here being gravity rather than space exposure). One castle, built atop a huge mountain, has a door in the throne room that leads directly outside the walls. This is the door unwanted visitors exit through.
• The Space Odyssey Series: The same spacing incident from the film also happens in the book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, in the third sequel, 3001: The Final Odyssey, the body of Frank Poole (one of the spaced astronauts) is discovered floating in space. Thanks to the advanced technology of 3001, he is revived, making him one of the few non-superpowered individuals to survive spacing.
• In Star Trek: Typhon Pact, the Gorn Hegemony is shown to practice this as a form of execution. The prisoner is entitled to an official trial, but that doesn't stop some commanders spacing traitors there and then. In the novel Seize the Fire, the Gorn technologist S'syrixx is thrown out the airlock, having been found guilty of sabotage.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: In the short story "Blade Squadron", Imperial Admiral Jhared Montferrat is introduced ordering four smugglers he captured on the way to Endor spaced on his suspicion they might be Rebel spies.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy, the main villain is ejected into hyperspace after the slaves on his flagship mutiny. They send him in an Escape Pod, but without a method of reversion to realspace, the end result is the same. This was done on the premise that regular "spacing", or any other form of execution that the killer could think of for that matter, would be too quick. The executioner had been enslaved for decades by the villain in question and seen most of his comrades brutally murdered, so it's no surprise that he wanted to get the most out of his revenge.
  • Legacy of the Force: Exile has, halfway through the book, a brainwashed space admiral open up all the doors on a ship that needed to be gotten rid of. All the airlocks and vents and everything. Everyone loses their air, except for the admiral, who is ensconced on the spare bridge. The insane admiral had done all this after overhearing some code words the Captain used (then killing him).
  • X-Wing Series: Solo Command has some of this trope used, when the big viewport at the bridge of General Solo's flagship is breached. The blowing-wind effect happens, but there's also an automated system to seal the doors after a bit so that the rest of the ship can function in battle, usually with surviving officers commanding from the auxiliary bridge. In the case of this book, the people who didn't get blown into space try to leave by that door before it closes, find that the air blasts through much harder from that point, and get saved by Chewbacca holding it open and pulling them through.
  • Played with when Grand Moff Tarkin hears that an officer has been spreading (partially true) rumors that Admiral Daala was sleeping with Moff for her position; he jettisons the officer into space in low orbit around the planet in a spacesuit and leaves the suit's comlink on so the rest of the ship can hear his final moments as he plunges into the atmosphere and burns up.
  • A few times in Galaxy of Fear: The Nightmare Machine, though it happens at a space station and is a simulation anyway.
  • In Han Solo at Star's End, Han determines that one of the people on his ship is The Mole. The traitor flees, hoping to find a place on the Falcon where he can hole up... but stumbles into the airlock instead. Once he gets the information he needs (and the captive has tried to claim Solo's no different) and finds time to quip that it's just as well he stumbled into the airlock since he would've ended up there anyway, Han just hits the button. Since they're in hyperspace, his body is annihilated once he leaves the Falcon's protective field.
  • The Han Solo Trilogy: Someone used this method to kill themselves in Han's childhood.
• In Ben Bova's Venus, Captain Fuchs places rebelling crew members onboard a faulty Escape Pod and ejects it, leading to an extremely painful and messy Explosive Decompression.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In The Vor Game, Oser orders Miles and Co. thrown out of an airlock to eliminate them quickly, rather than let Miles have time to take over as he had before. It doesn't work. This happens to poor Miles again later in the same book, although the second time he had the advantage of a lifeboat.
  • In Falling Free, a character tries to commit suicide this way. Fortunately enough, her friend got there in time and jammed the airlock shut.
  • At the end of Komarr, Ekaterin and her aunt are being held hostage in an airlock, partly to enable this threat and partly so Ekaterin can't get out and wreck the hostage-takers' plans again.
• Warhammer 40,000: In the Horus Heresy novel Know No Fear, Roboute Guilliman gets sucked out into space without a helmet after a daemon blows out the windows of his flagship’s bridge. Since Guilliman is a primarch, this barely inconveniences him.
  • In the first Grey Knights novel, the insane Inquisitor Ligea is executed this way, though it's by blowing out the back wall of her prison cell rather than a conventional airlock. It's still a fairly gruesome scene nonetheless.

Live-Action TV

• The 100: In order to save as much resources as possible, every execution in the Ark is done by "floating", or ejecting people into space without protection. And because on the Ark All Crimes Are Equal, that happens a lot.
• In the penultimate episode of Avenue 5, dozens of the Upper-Class Twit passengers aboard the titular Starship Luxurious become convinced that they are on a reality show or in a Lotus-Eater Machine, and after some very poor attempts by Ryan, Matt, and Billie to talk them down, an idiot walks into the airlock and immediately dies when it opens up to outer space, freezing to death with his eyeballs popping. Jaden, who "works in visual effects", declares it a special effect, and helps more people rush the airlock. A total of seven people die before the crowd finally get the hint when Sarah's hand brushes the wall and snaps off on the way out.
  Harrison: Oh, I'm scared, I'm so scared! Hahahahaha, joke's on you, Herman, you big assh—
• Babylon 5:
  • Several episodes mention that spacing is the preferred method of execution for treason and mutiny in the Earth Alliance military; one character is threatened with spacing after it is discovered that he shot Garibaldi in the back. Treason is the only crime still punishable by physical death; murderers are sentenced to the supposedly more humane Death of Personality.
  • When Sinclair was missing in a season one episode, Garibaldi noted that he was having maintenance search the outer hull because the station has enough gravity to keep a spaced corpse on the hull.
  • A character in another episode is actually (hyper)spaced by Bester and another Psi-Cop.
  • In the reporter-visit episode "And Now for a Word", Dr. Franklin describes an incident when he was a kid where he and one of his friends were playing a game and the friend hid in an airlock. He was accidentally ejected and killed, and as a result, Franklin never laughs at jokes about putting people out of the airlock.
  • A species who're into Alien Abduction also space their captives when Ivanova and Delenn catch up with them. Needless to say, the aliens quickly die for this atrocity.
  • G'Kar's first aide, Ko'Dath, is offhandedly mentioned to have died in a freak airlock accident (off-screen, in between episodes) when her replacement arrives (her actress refused to return to the show due to the heavy makeup demanded by Narns causing her problems). G'Kar's tone indicates that he suspected foul play, but it's not confirmed.
  • The Card Game turned this one-note joke into a card called "Airlock mishap", which deals 2 damage to every ambassador's aide in the game. Notably, it's instantly fatal for all the starting aides except Ivanova, and can be a real pain if said Aide isn't in your inner circle yet.
  • In a Funny Moment from the season four episode "The Illusion of Truth", Sheridan calls Ivanova on threatening to space a nosy EarthGov reporter. His objection isn't to the threat, but that she didn't mention that the reporter was to be stripped naked before being spaced, in order to save his clothes for use on a station that's short on supplies due to a trade embargo. The reporter gets a good laugh from that.
  • Another CMOF in "There All the Honor Lies": when Sheridan spaces a teddy bear, which is later encountered by Keffer.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003) is the series that turned the word "airlock" into a verb.
  • This is the standard method of execution, usually employed to deal with Cylons and suspected Cylon collaborators. Often, it is not the airlock that is used, but Galactica's launch tubes — usually used for launching the ship's Vipers. Which justifies the long tube with a quick-opening door at the end.
  • Laura Roslin quickly earned the Fan Nickname "Madame Airlock" for her fondness of using this method to deal with undesirables.
  • Additionally, Cally and Chief Tyrol have to airlock themselves in order to be rescued by a Raptor when escaping from a faulty airlock.
  • Col. Tigh volunteers to be airlocked simply to put the screws to D'Anna's plan to coerce the Final Five Cylons out of hiding. Thankfully, Colonel Badass doesn't take the threatened "express ride into the vacuum", but an inconsequential Colonial pilot does — tossed out into space, ironically, by D'Anna.
  • Another variation, seen in "Blood on the Scales", is to have the person or persons killed while in the launch tube, which would then be opened. Execution and burial, all in one.
  • Cally Tyrol dies this way in "The Ties That Bind" when she finds out that her husband is one of the Final Five Cylons and takes her son into the launch tube with intent to commit Murder-Suicide. She's stopped by Tory Foster, another of the Final Five, who takes the kid before locking her in and sending her into space.
• Black Mirror: In the episode "USS Callister", Daly throws a digital copy of Walton's son Tommy out the airlock to break Walton's spirit and force him to comply with Daly's orders.
• Blake's 7:
  • Another take on this trope has an airlock tunnel between two spacecraft being torn loose as one vessel suddenly blasts off, killing those inside. This happens in the episodes "Space Fall" and "Gold".
  • In "Orbit", Avon tries to airlock Vila when they're both stuck on an escape pod that needs to lose a lot of weight quickly to avoid crashing. Things get... pretty dark before an alternative solution is found.
  • In "Warlord", Servalan leaves a magnetic bomb in the airlock of Warlord Zukan's spacecraft. Zukan sends in his aide to remove it, blowing him out the airlock the moment he detaches the bomb from the metal wall. Unfortunately, the bomb explodes at that point, fatally crippling the spacecraft, so the warlord dies anyway.
• Dark Matter (2015):
  • It happens to Two at Wexler's hands in "Episode Ten". She survives, and does it to Wexler in the next episode.
  • Pre-amnesia, after Three discovered Five stowing away, he was about to do this to her. Six stopped him, and he claimed he wasn't actually going to go through with it but just wanted to scare her.
  • In "But First, We Save the Galaxy", this happens to an android by his own hand to get rid of a bomb that had been hidden in his body.
  • Later, the Evil Counterpart versions of Portia and Marcus from an Alternate Universe eject every prisoner being held on a transport they just liberated into space, as they're useless to them.
• In Defiance this apparently happened in the backstory to Datak's romantic rival when the other man was on his way to duel Datak over Stahma's hand in marriage. "Accidentally" of course. Stahma later confirms fan suspicions that it was she and not Datak who spaced her own unwanted fiancé, rather than leave things to chance.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Daleks' Master Plan": Short-lived companion Katarina spaces herself as a Heroic Sacrifice to kill the homicidal psychopath who's holding her hostage.
  • "Planet of Evil": One of the cliffhangers has the Doctor and Sarah in the process of being conveyed out the airlock by one of the spaceship officers, who thinks the Doctor and Sarah are responsible for the story's high body count. Another murder happens at that point, but even then they only escape death because someone has the decency to run back and stop the process.
  • "The Long Game": The Doctor only takes Adam Mitchell home after he royally screws up, but Adam says "Blimey. I thought you were gonna chuck me out of an airlock." Not that the TARDIS has one, as it can generate an atmosphere in vacuum — the Doctor and their companions are frequently shown looking out into space.
  • "The Impossible Planet": The possessed Toby kills Scooti by telekinetically blowing out a window, causing her to be sucked into space.
  • "42": Captain McDonnell opens the airlock deliberately to send her and her possessed husband into space. It's something of a Tear Jerker.
  • "Midnight": After the Hostess realizes that Sky is still possessed by the unseen entity, she grabs her, opens the rear door (with airlock) and lets the truck's safety system throw them both into the vacuum. This saves the Doctor's life, as some of the other passengers, believing him to be possessed, were trying to throw him out of the front door, which formerly led to the cockpit, and which doesn't have an airlock. As a bit of a kicker at the end, none of the passengers, not even the Doctor, ever bothered to learn the hostess' name.
  • "The Time of Angels": River Song throws herself out of an airlock with intent to land in the TARDIS, to whose occupants she has just given the coordinates via Timey-Wimey Ball. Don't worry, the TARDIS has the capability to create an "air corridor".
    • The worrying part is that she is trusting her life to the Doctor eventually finding her message — which he does, 12,000 years later. One of the nice things about the Timey-Wimey Ball is that it is never too late for a retroactive Big Damn Heroes moment.
  • The Action Prologue of "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe" features the airlock disintegrating around the Doctor, who then has to catch and put on a spacesuit while both are falling towards the planet's surface. He succeeds (of course) but puts his helmet on backwards in the rush.
  • In "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", the pirate Solomon did this to the crew of a Silurian ark he came across. All several thousand of them.
  • "Mummy on the Orient Express": Evil AI Gus does this to everyone in the kitchen staff in order to force the Doctor to end his telephone conversation with Clara.
  • "Under the Lake": An underwater example — Moran's ghost kills Pritchard, who'd just come back from a scuba trip looking for the missing power cell from the spaceship, by opening the airlock again.
  • "The Tsuranga Conundrum": The Doctor ejects the Pting from the ship this way after feeding it the self-destruct bomb. Due to its Nigh-Invulnerability, it's fine.
  • "Resolution": The Doctor disposes of the Dalek recon scout by using a vacuum corridor to suck it out of the TARDIS' doors into a supernova.
• Doom Patrol (2019): Niles does this to Cliff, except it isn't fatal due to Cliff being a Brain in a Jar robot. He angrily crash lands on Earth and has to find his own way home.
• The Expanse:
  • The Belter Mateo, who's been screwed over by the Martians, launches his nephew out in an EVA suit before he takes his ship on a suicide attack against them.
  • Miller nearly kills a corrupt landlord this way for failing to replace faulty air filters. Ironically enough, Miller himself nearly suffers this at the hands of Dawes' minions, and in the exact same airlock no less, though Olivia rescues him.
  • Johnson does this with a belligerent OPA faction leader who's refusing to follow his orders.
  • Following the battle on Ganymede, a Belter ship carrying Ganymedian refugees to Tycho Station decides to space all of the inners (read: Earthers and Martians) as payback. Poor Prax loses one of his closest friends this way, and nothing can be done about it as the whole situation is both a humanitarian crisis and political shitshow. Bonus points go to this being one of the most scientifically accurate, and realistically brutal, depictions of exposure to a vacuum.
  • Beloved Belter pirate Klaes Ashford eventually gets airlocked, chucked into vacuum for refusing to play ball with Marco Inaros. Ashford gets big bonus points because his death is beautifully filmed, poignant (he dies singing a lullaby he sang to his deceased child), and plot-relevant: he gets Marco to incriminate himself, records it, and ensures that the recording reaches Drummer after his death.
  • Naomi does this to herself, barely managing to survive, in an attempt to get herself to a ship she can use to escape Marco Inaros.
• Extant: Kryger does this to his hallucination, who unfortunately appears as his deceased mother.
• Farscape
  • One episode had a kamikaze baddie that could magnetically attach herself to metal, and guide some Negative Space Wedgie missile. At the end of the episode, after she escapes her cage and attaches herself to a wall, Crighton nonchalantly informs her that she attached herself to an airlock, and a detachable one to boot. Moments later, the airlock itself is thrown out, taking her with it.
  • D'Argo is accidentally spaced when he is ejected from Moya in "They've Got a Secret", however due to his Luxan physiology, he survives. Over the course of the series, most of Moya's crew (save Aeryn, Zhaan and Sikozu) find themselves spaced (unintentionally or intentionally), but all survive with little if any ill effects. Most notably, during the "Look at the Princess" trilogy Crichton spaces himself without any form of spacesuit or protection in a desperate attempt to escape a doomed spacecraft, and is able to survive for more than a minute before he is able to get himself on board a nearby craft. The only ill effects are frostbite-like symptoms that are virtually shrugged off a few scenes later.
  • Noranti, in "I Shrink Therefore I Am", goes so far as to whip up a special compound that allows her to hang around in space, comatose, for several arns without any ill effects.
• Firefly:
  • Mal threatens to do this to Simon in "Serenity" if he fails to save Kaylee, who is laid up with a nasty gunshot wound after being accidentally shot by the Fed trying to bring Simon in, since Simon had refused to treat her unless Mal got them away from the Feds:
    Simon: What about us?
    Mal: Kaylee comes through, you and your sister get off at Whitefall.
    Simon: If she doesn't come through?
    Mal: Well, then you're gettin' off a mite sooner.
  • In "Ariel", Mal almost does this to Jayne for ratting Simon and River out to the Feds on Ariel for the reward money. It's a variation in that Mal locks the inner door as Firefly is flying through the atmosphere into outer space, leaving Jayne trapped on the other side. Jayne fearfully states that this "ain't no way for a man to die", but then accepts his fate only asking that Mal not tell the others he betrayed them. Mal then closes the outer door (but still keeps the inner door closed), feeling that Jayne has learnt his lesson.
    Mal: I hear tell they used to keelhaul traitors back in the day. I don't have a keel to haul you on, so...
  • In the Serenity tabletop RPG, getting thrown out an airlock is instant death.
• Done by a doctor in Lexx, to a patient whose bank account he's finished sucking dry even though there was nothing wrong with her in the first place.
• Lost in Space (2018):
  • Viewers' introduction to "Dr. Smith" is her accidentally murdering a Resolute crewman by trapping him in an airlock and refusing to cancel the automatic cycle after he recognizes that she is not, in fact, his lover. (She is actually her lover's evil sister.) The second season reveals that he was the father of a young girl named Samantha.
  • In the finale, this happens to the Robot, twice. First time, Maureen manages to get it out of the ship, just in time for a second ship and a second Robot to arrive, pry open the closing doors, and continue terrorizing the Robinsons. Then, the first Robot recalls its relationship to Will, and saves them by tackling the second Robot well clear of the Jupiter 2.
• The Mandalorian.
  • In "The Heiress", several Mandalorians are doing a mid-air seizure of an Imperial transport, only to be sealed behind blast doors in the cargo hold.
    Officer: I think we have them trapped, sir.
    Captain: Trapped them where?
    Officer: In the cargo control area.
    Captain: (sporting an expression that screams "Are you fucking serious?") Where?
    Officer: In the cargo control areAAAAAAAAAH!
    (The Officer and several Stormtroopers are jettisoned out of the cargo hold)
  • In "The Rescue", the main character does the same thing to a platoon of Dark Troopers. Unfortunately, since they're droids armed with rocket boots, it doesn't get rid of them for long.
• The Orville: The Kaylons send a crewman out the airlock and make Ed watch as punishment for his resistance to their occupation of the Orville.
• Other Space plays this card several times in the first few episodes: the whole crew at first, then the various accused alien infiltrators.
• The Outer Limits (1995):
  • In "The Voyage Home", an astronaut jettisons one of his crew members because he thinks that the guy turned into a monstrous alien in front of him.
  • In "Abaddon", Curtis Sandoval is jettisoned from the waste disposal system of the interplanetary hauling vehicle Pequod by Virgil Nygard.
  • In "Think Like a Dinosaur", Michael Burr throws Kamala Shastri out the airlock of the Tuulen Transfer Station on The Moon in order to balance the equation of the Hanen jump technology.
• Quark. When an computer goes insane and tries to kill the crew, Quark disconnects the computer and throws it out the garbage chute. The episode ends with the computer floating through space singing "Born Free".
• In Space: 1999: End of Eternity, this is how the villain of the week is dispatched. The airlock was on the Moon rather than in space, and the villain's final resting place is glossed over: given his Healing Factor, it could be an And I Must Scream situation.
• Almost happens to Harlan in the second episode of Space Cases.
• Stargate-verse:
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • In the episode "Tangent", Jack O'Neill and Teal'c have to do this to themselves (ie. leave their ship without suits) in order to be evacuated to another ship with a Ring Transporter. They survive unharmed.
    • In "Prometheus", Jack and Teal'c use this method on the eponymous ship to get rid of the Goa'uld-infested Colonel Simmons.
    • In a low-atmosphere example, SG-1 used a ring transporter to beam out a Kull warrior they couldn't stop otherwise. His death was presumably messy.
    • "Company of Thieves", Vala does this to a Lucian Alliance goon who was about to kill Samantha Carter, albeit without an airlock: She uses a damaged Asgard transporter to beam him into space, albeit not on purpose — they didn't know where the goon had been transported to until they looked out the window.
  • Stargate Atlantis:
    • This is one of the ways the Wraith virus controlling the Daedalus likes to kill people in the episode "The Intruder". It spaces an unfortunate Red Shirt, and tries to do the same to McKay and Sheppard, leading to an amusing Oh, Crap! moment before they realize that they are protected by a force field.
    • Also done to Niam in "Progeny". Since Asurans don't need to breathe, it doesn't actually kill him, but he's left floating in high orbit around the planet.
    • In the episode "Travelers", Larrin threatens to drop Sheppard out of Hangar Bay, going as far as opening the doors, leaving him standing on a force shield. Though she doesn't actually voice the threat beyond saying "Don't worry. You're safe as long as the force shield doesn't malfunction, and that almost never happens." Her crew previously state they assume she blew the last man who disappointed her out into space, though this could simply be posturing.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In the episode "Contagion", it is reported that eighteen people were killed when the Yamato's computer shut down the force field in an open shuttle bay. It turns out they were just dying early to avoid the rush.
    • In "The Naked Now", the crew of the Tsiolkovsky do this to themselves after a virus affects their reasoning and they blow an emergency hatch. It's a Sound-Only Death in that case, heard by the horrified bridge crew of the Enterprise over the comm system.
    • Riker and Data then board the Tsiolkovsky with Tasha and Geordi, and bring up a view of the main bridge on a monitor:
      Riker: You were right. Somebody blew out the hatch. They were all sucked out into space.
      Data: Correction, sir. That's blown out.
      Riker: [mildly irritated] Thank you, Data.
      Data: A common mistake, sir.
    • In Lore's first appearance in "Datalore", he is defeated when Data throws him onto a cargo transporter and Wesley beams him into space. Being an android, Lore survives the experience.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • In "The Nagus", Quark is nearly thrown out an airlock by his brother Rom.
    • Kira threatens to space Quark "if I ever get my hands on that little troll!" in one second season episode.
    • In "The House of Quark", D'Ghor threatens to throw Quark out of the nearest airlock if he insists that the Klingon that had died in his bar — revealed to be an old enemy of Kozak's — died in a drunken accident instead of in honorable combat against Quark.
    • In "Defiant", Will Riker (actually Thomas Riker) tells Sisko that Dr. Crusher practically pushed him out an airlock in order to get him to go on shore leave.
    • In "Afterimage", Garak nearly spaces himself during an acute attack of claustrophobia.
    • In "Covenant", Gul Dukat spaces a follower who's become inconvenient, though he only opens the airlock a crack so she'll suffocate. Kira finds her Just in Time to save her.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • Early, on, the Kazon, after stealing a working transporter from Voyager, use it to space two rival Kazon leaders. The Voyager crew initially assume they just can't use it correctly until Neelix identifies the pair.
    • In "Rise", the villain of the week gets thrown out of a Space Elevator which is so high up in the ionosphere it counts as this trope.
    • In the "Scorpion" two-parter, Chakotay tries to vent the Borg into space after Seven of Nine hijacks control of the deflector array to create a portal into fluidic space. It works on all but Seven, who manages to brace herself until the pressure equalizes. Thanks to her implants, she can carry on in a vacuum.
    • The below scene from Enterprise hits many of the same notes as one in "Equinox, Part II", with Captain Janeway as the increasingly obsessive interrogator, and a room open to alien attacks as the airlock. The big difference is that Janeway doesn't back down — Chakotay intervenes to save the prisoner. This scene earned Janeway a "Madame Airlock" reputation well before Roslin.
    • One of the many They Killed Kenny Again incidents to befall Harry Kim involves him getting blown out into space while trying to fix a hull breach. He gets replaced by an alternate universe self and keeps on trucking.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise:
    • In "Cold Front", Silik spaces himself (his Bizarre Alien Biology allows him to survive in a vacuum for short periods) and almost takes Archer with him.
    • In "Regeneration", Archer spaces two Borgified Tarkaleans when Malcom's security team cannot kill them with phasers.
    • At one point in the Xindi arc, a prisoner refuses to take Captain Archer's threats seriously, so Archer sticks him in the airlock and starts venting out the air. He makes a convincing enough show that the prisoner gives in; we're left to wonder how far Archer might have gone otherwise.
    • In the alternate-timeline episode "Twilight", The Bridge itself gets shot off during the climactic battle, and the entire bridge crew get spaced.
    • Also during the Xindi arc, during the battle in "Azati Prime", Enterprise suffers multiple hull breaches, one of which shows three redshirts getting blown into space.
    • Archer spaces himself in one episode to escape a space station that is moments away from emptying its stores of deadly viruses into the ventilation system. He's beamed onto the ship moments after clearing the airlock and materializes half-frozen.
    • Trip and Malcolm also space themselves once to escape a Romulan drone ship that they're trapped on. Fortunately, they're both wearing space suits, so they survive long enough for Enterprise to beam them back.
    • The evil Mirror Universe Archer from "In a Mirror, Darkly" threatens to space T'Pol if she betrays him — in this case, there's no doubt that he would carry out his threat.
  • Star Trek: Discovery:
    • The second episode features a Big Badass Battle Sequence, during which two officers on the Shenzhou are spaced through hull breaches. One is friends with Commander Burnham, and she's visibly distressed to watch him die right in front of her.
    • This seems to be the standard execution method for treason in the Mirror Universe's Terran Empire, done through the transporter. You get to see the bodies of the condemned souls slowly go blue as their breath freezes into icicles. Brrrrrr.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • Discussed in "Nepenthe" when Rios suspects that Raffi is a Tal Shiar mole.
      Rios: Raffi, I have one more thought about finding this guy. But I don't think you're gonna like it very much.
      Raffi: Why? Does it involve shooting me out of an airlock?
      Rios: I really hope not.
    • In "Broken Pieces", the Romulans vent the Artifact's compartments containing the unprocessed Borg before Seven of Nine can turn them to her side.
    • In "Surrender" Seven of Nine and Jack Crusher enclose themselves within a shield while they open the bridge evacuation hatch, blowing Vadic and one of her mooks out into space.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Cold Equations", Marilyn Lee Cross must be jettisoned into space after she stows away on the Emergency Dispatch Ship because her added weight means the ship doesn't have enough fuel to land safely at its destination Woden.

Music

• The Mechanisms
  • The backstory says that the band's creators and the original captain of the Aurora was Dr. Carmilla, "who, unfortunately, has since fallen out an airlock." Given the Mechanisms' general antipathy towards her, and how Ax-Crazy they all get when they get bored, the insistence that Dr. Carmilla fell is generally seen as Suspiciously Specific Denial. At the very least, none of them seem particularly broken up over it.
  • In "The Bifrost Incident", this is how Thor pulls a Mutual Kill on Jormugandr, shattering a cabin window with an engineer's hammer and venting them both into space.

Radio

• Ford and Arthur in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978). They survive the airlock toss out of the Vogon ship thanks to the Infinite Improbability Drive, in a surreal scene involving Moving Buildings, detached limbs, penguins, and an infinite number of monkeys using an infinite number of typewriters (which naturally results in a Shakespeare script). It's kind of hard to explain, which is probably why the film replaced it with a less "odd" scene involving sofas. However, the BBC television adaptation, despite its much smaller budget, portrayed the scene much closer to the original. (As did the novel.)

Tabletop Games

• The Battlestar Galactica board games make reference to this. In particular, the Pegasus Expansion introduces the execution mechanic that can be accessed from the Pegasus' airlocks for the times where brigging someone doesn't feel sufficient. Presumably, Cylon players that reveal themselves (an action that deals damage to the human players and lands the Cylon on the Ressurection ship) also make a trip through the airlock if they don't die directly during their attack.
• Battletech: ilKhan Leo Showers of the Clans died when the bridge of the WarShip he was on was rammed and lost pressure, throwing him into space. Several other people were on the bridge with him and successfully evacuated as the pressure fell (including his eventual successor Ulric Kerensky); Showers' death is noted to be simple bad luck of standing too close to the windows at the time of impact.
• Eclipse Phase
  • Some of the background fiction in the rulebook has a reference to using the airlock to Shoot the Dog — but if you're going to stop someone from infecting others with the Exsurgent virus, well, hard vacuum is grimly convenient.
  • In the starting adventure included in the "quick start" PDF there's a point where the PCs have to jump out an airlock, vacsuits optional. Game effect, some stress points when they download into their next morphs.
• In Fading Suns this is what happens to you when you piss off the Guilders.
• [[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/137637/hidden-intruder Hidden Intruder] allows killing the alien using this method. However, it can obtain the fast reflexes mutation to avoid being thrown out, and also become immune to vacuum (and therefore prevent the humans from winning when it's alive outside the station.)
• Classic Traveller Adventure 1 "The Kinunir". In the scenario "The Lost Ship", the title starship's Artificial Intelligence became paranoid and evacuated the ship to vacuum, killing the crew and blowing their bodies into space. The PC's can find several bodies near a small asteroid.
• The Imperial Navy of Warhammer 40,000 prescribes this as a punishment for many, many offenses.
  • Actually averted in one of the Ciaphas Cain books, however, at least in terms of the Hollywood Science aspects. Cain is exposed to hard vacuum, but there's no rushing gale, he's not ejected, and he has a few seconds to reach a saviour pod.

Toys

• In BIONICLE, Teridax teleports Miserix, Helryx, Hafu, Kapura, Tuyet, Artahka, Brutaka, and Axonn out into space. Fortunately, Lewa managed to interfere with the process and get himself teleported too, so he could create a large air bubble so that everyone could breathe.

Video Games

• In the 1990s Aliens vs. Predator PC game, Marine players had to beat the Queen by airlocking her.
• In the multiplayer web-based video game Among Us this is the fate of "imposters" aboard The Skeld. Or of totally innocent players that enough other players think are imposters.
• In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! Handsome Jack throws out his top scientists into space after being told one of them "might" have been The Mole for Zarpedon.
• In Bulletstorm, Gray does this to a captured bounty hunter in the very first scene of the game.
• In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's Mile High Club bonus level, the airliner suffers a hull breach, sucking out several tangos.
• In the Chzo Mythos game 7 Days A Skeptic, this is how crewmember Adam meets his end. A hatch for an escape pod is opened where there's no escape pod. Thanks to there being No OSHA Compliance on the ship, Adam is blown into space. You get blown out too unless you quickly close the door.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day throws an alien out an airlock, blatantly spoofing the scene from Alien. However, it’s downplayed- every time you do so, the alien grabs onto the sides of the airlock and jumps back into the arena. It’s death is ultimately caused in a different way. Before that, the dead bodies of the Panther King and Berri get thrown out of the airlock, too. Professor Von Kriplespac is tossed out of it as well, lamenting how stupid of an idea it was to travel to space.
• The player can toss just about anything out the airlock in the game Creatures 3, from random trash you don't want lying around to living creatures. Sometimes the latter will accidentally throw itself out the airlock by crawling inside and pressing the button, thus proving that artificial life is not the same as artificial intelligence.
• Dead Space:
  • Dead Space 2 allows a variant on this; in some sections of the Sprawl that are being renovated, the reinforced glass is replaced by a breakable variety; shooting those panels will depressurize the room and drag any necromorphs out with it. Players must be quick to hit the emergency release, or they will get blown out as well.
  • Dead Space 3: This is how Isaac deals with the Regenerator necromorphs this time around: while being in space doesn't kill a necromorph, they're aren't much of a threat if they're stranded in a vacuum with no way to maneuver.
  • This also is Isaac Clarke's Level 3 Super in Playstation All Stars Battle Royale, where he shoots the airlock and sends his opponents into space, letting him take them out easily in an homage to Asteroids.
• The third game in the Don't Escape series has the player character awakening to a countdown where you'll be ejected into space if you don't stop it. It was set in place by the player, albeit with the crystal controlling you.
• One of the space station levels in Double Dragon Neon has an airlock door that periodically opens and closes, which is a callback to the chopper level in the NES version of Double Dragon II.
• This is the whole point of the Flash game Evacuation. The airlocks are color-coded, so you have to devise a plan that will vent the aliens without losing too many crew (either to space or the hungry aliens).
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, opening airlocks behind boarding enemies is a popular way of dealing with them. Realistically, there is no wind that blows them out (although it takes a few seconds to vent any room that doesn't open directly to space), but the suffocation is pretty lethal.
• Goose Goose Duck: On sci-fi themed maps, Blackswan, SS Mothergoose, and Nexus Colony, players voted out of the game are expelled from the ship's airlock, as opposed to the Cement Shoes used on the game's Victorian murdery mystery maps.
• Halo:
  • In Halo: Reach, Jorge throws Noble Six out an airlock of a Covenant corvette just before the slipspace portal bomb goes off, sending Jorge, the corvette, and most of a Covenant supercarrier to oblivion. Except in this case, Jorge did it to save Six (who is wearing vacuum-sealed armor, after all).
  • In one of the later stages in Halo 4, you can do this to Covenant who are trying to enter a space station through an airlock.
  • The introductory cutscene of Blue Team’s first mission in Halo 5: Guardians sees the Spartans enter a space station by weakening a viewport with their weapons before slamming through it. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome for the Covenant who have taken the station, as they begin to slide toward the viewport when they begin to react and are spaced, while the Spartan’s magnetic boots keep them firmly locked to the deck until the breach is sealed. Ironically, a shot of the Elites inside the station before Blue Team enters has their leader order some unruly grunts thrown out the airlock.
• Heat Signature: It seems to be universal protocol for all vessels across the four nations for armed guards to dispose of all subdued intruders via the nearest available airlock. Fortunately for you, you can remotely control your shuttle to pick you up before you asphyxiate.
• The Jackbox Party Pack: The object of "Push the Button" is for the human players to deduce which of them are aliens in disguise and call a successful vote to eject the impostors out the airlock, while the aliens are trying to throw suspicion on the humans so one or more of them gets thrown out instead.
• Happens a couple times in The Journeyman Project series.
  • In the remake of the first game, Pegasus Prime, two of three airlocks are empty in the Mars Colony's shuttle bay. If Agent 5 opens one of these, he falls out the airlock into Mars' thin atmosphere, fatally landing at the bottom of Coprates Minor.
  • In Buried in Time, Arthur gives Agent 5 the code to blow open an airlock in Amarax Station, so that the decompression can propel Agent 5 onto Arthur's detached AI Nexus. Sealing foam plugs up the airlock after Agent 5 gets there.
• Last Scenario does this but with an airship instead of a spaceship. Before Tiamat can blow up the Lemuria and everybody on it, Alison grabs her and, after getting Ethan to open up a cargo hatch, drags the both of them out through it.
• The first level of the Episode IV room of LEGO Star Wars gives players the opportunity to space as many Imperials as you have time for during a level replay.
• In Lemmings 2: The Tribes, automatic airlock doors are a deathtrap that the Space Tribe must avoid.
• In Little Big Adventure 2, on the Emerald Moon, you can trick one of the Franco guards inside the base into following you into the airlock, then put on your space suit, which automatically opens the outer door. Bye-bye, Franco guard.
• In Live A Live, you can do this to yourself in Cube's chapter and get a Game Over. It also almost happens (by accident) in the story, after a crew member goes insane.
• Once they get their hands on jump pad-less transporters, teleporting people into space becomes the favored punishment by rampant AIs in the Marathon series, which can happen to the player in the Infinity level "Foe Hammer".
  • The player does this to a pair of Pfhor Enforcers in one level of the Game Mod Tempus Irae, only to get thrown into space by an explosion shortly afterwards.
  • Another third-party scenario had an airlock that sucked the player out and killed them by Explosive Decompression.
• Mass Effect
  • In Mass Effect 2, Aria's batarian bodyguard threatens to "toss your sorry ass out the nearest airlock" if you forget who's really in charge on Omega (hint: it's Aria).
  • During Jacob's romance, he points out that "one-nighting the Commander is a good way to get airlocked". Which brings into question the fact that by the third game, he hooks up with someone else regardless of said romance. He also suggests doing this to Legion rather than activating them.
  • Happens to Shepard at the start of the second game when the Normandy SR-1 is destroyed.
  • This is how the Collectors are finally purged from the Normandy during the attack, and it is brought up as an option if something goes wrong while opening Grunt's pod.
  • Non-living being example, Shepherd can jettison a compacted garbage cube in Zaeed's quarters.
  • In Mass Effect 3, when Javik learns of Legion, he settles for nothing less than having it spaced. He also threatens Joker with this when the latter insists the former call himself "Prothy the Prothean". Suffice to say, it quickly became a meme for Javik to throw anything he doesn't like out the airlock.
  • At one point in the Citadel DLC, Shepard gets in on the act as well. While caught in a trap, (s)he can make a series of increasingly colorful threats to the villains, culminating in, "Then, I'm going to take both your heads and space them out the airlock!" If Javik is in your party at the time, he'll mutter, "Finally!"
  • Also in Citadel, if you bring Javik with you to retake the Normandy and then spare Brooks, he'll comment "It's not too late to throw her out the airlock".
  • Another in Citadel, Shepard and Javik find themselves guest-starring in Blasto 7. Javik eventually gets fed up with Blasto's actor being The Prima Donna.
    Javik: Where is the airlock so I may throw you out of it!?
    Director: We don't have a prop for that!
  • In the penultimate mission, Cerberus attempts to vent the hangar that Shepard's squad is assaulting. EDI ensures otherwise, provided you find and reach the correct console before the invisible timer runs out. There is a certain amount of Fridge Logic to it, given that the armor the protagnists wear also functions as space suits, and in the first game they were shown to have some means of securing the soles of their boots to the hull of the outside of a space station, so how exactly could venting the hanger be that lethal of a threat?
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda has it happen a couple of times.
    • Liam's Loyalty Mission has the pirate who's ship Ryder and the gang are on try to do this to them, because he's an asshole.
    • Nearly happens during Cora's Loyalty Mission, when the captain of the asari ark mistakes them for kett. Fortunately, the matter is cleared up before anyone gets spaced.
    • Invoked by Nakmor Kesh after finishing Drack's loyalty mission, assuming Ryder has William Spender arrested. She makes sure every airlock on the Nexus is working properly, just in case someone decides Spender should have an "accident". She has every reason to hate the guy, but no-one's getting airlocked on her watch. Though she's not above threatening to use the airlock on him herself, like she did the time he tried to reroute the power that's keeping all the stasis pods on the Nexus functional.
• Near the end of level 3 in MDK2, Doctor Hawkins has to push the lever which opens the airlock on the other side of the large room, promptly blowing all air out and him as well if he doesn't make use of that newly found magnet. Even after making magnetic boots, he's still in danger of suffocating if he doesn't make a spacesuit (out of a fishbowl).
• In the ending of the Game Boy Mega Man IV, Ballade blows one open in a Heroic Sacrifice to let Mega Man out of Wily's ship.
• Used to interesting effect in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, where the chaotic first level features space pirates and federation troopers being blown out of damaged airlocks and holes in the ship (there's a bonus for getting the blast doors down in time to save one trooper). Samus also ends up being shot out of an airlock, then manages to get back inside through another.
  • Samus almost gets hit with this towards the final act of Metroid: Other M, but manages to activate her Gravity Suit in time.
• Portal 2: At the end, Chell wins the fight with Wheatley by opening one portal directly under him and the other one on the surface of the Moon, blowing out everything that isn't nailed down, including the Portal Gun, Wheatley, and herself. After they end up hanging on the Wheatley's cable, GLaDOS reaches her mechanical claw in, knocks Wheatley into space, and, surprisingly, pulls Chell back, then seals the portal. Interestingly, it also completely justifies the "long wind" issue, as it had the entire Earth atmosphere to equalize.
• If you manage to find the Comm Satellite secret level of Quake II, you'll notice a threshold with danger markings at the beginning of the level. Beyond the threshold is a stash of goodies placed conveniently near an opened airlock. Do the math.
• A variation occurs in Sonic Adventure 2, where Sonic is trapped in a pod and ejected from the ARK. We see him plummet towards Earth before exploding. Of course, he survives and comes back just in time to fight Shadow for the second time.
  • Can also accidentally happen to Tails in one level set on the ARK: if the explosive packs on an airlock are hit with homing missiles, Explosive Decompression ensues, and Tails can get blown out into space if he wanders to close to the hole he just made. One section of this level has Omochao stand right next to an airlock that can be blown out. Do so, and Omochao will be continually sucked out of the airlock and respawned.
  • In the opening of Sonic Unleashed, after having the Chaos Emeralds extracted and drained to power a planet-cracking laser and himself transformed from the energy backlash, Sonic is jettisoned by Eggman along with the depleted Emeralds. He survives the fall thanks to Chip's intervention, but how he survived spacing and re-entry is never explained.
• Space Pirates and Zombies has this as a gameplay mechanic. Your ships can recover escape pods and incorporate the survivors into their crew pool (assuming it's below maximum). However, given you are literally enslaving these people, not all of them will be cooperative. Thus, there's a certain chance that the survivor will be spaced for being unruly, which goes down as you add points to your crew skill.
• Mentioned in Space Quest V: The Next Mutation. When Roger asks why the Eureka's captaincy is vacant, Droole mentions that the last captain had an "unfortunate accident" in the airlock. The nonchalant way it's written and the snarky attitude of the crew more than imply that Droole, Flo, and Cliffy arranged the "accident."
  • It's also possible for Roger Wilco to throw himself out of the airlock by "accident".
    "Nice move, Ace. Really spectacular."
• A common way of disposing of bodies in Space Station 13, because it's probably one of the safest methods of killing.
• In the in-game tutorial for Star Trek Online, you are required to space a number of Borg drones by teleporting them into a corridor that is open to space, though safely on the other side of an atmospheric Force Field from where you are standing.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Jedi Outcast:
    • On the Cairn installation, the player can depressurize an entire hangar bay, blowing at least five poor bastards out with gale-force speed.
    • Later on, on the Doomgiver, there are 3 full hangars packed with pilots and stormtroopers that you can send flying into space. Of course, you can also do it to yourself — by accident.
  • In The Force Unleashed games, in levels set in a space environment (such as on a spacecraft), throwing someone out a window will break the window, space them, cause the ever-so-popular "gale-force winds" that will blow out anybody too close (except yourself), and then a safety door will slam down and cut off the wind.
    • Starkiller himself suffers this at Vader's hands so he could save face in front of Darth Sidious, but is recovered from low orbit and revived.
  • Discussed early on in X-Wing Alliance. After the Azzameen family survives a betrayal and ambush while trying to acquire bacta for the Rebels, Tomaas Azzameen sarcastically quips, "Do you think we should... space 'em?" when another member of the family objects to his plan to let the surviving ambushers go.
• In episode 4 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, "Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective", Craig (played by The Cheat) is disposed of in this way. Due to the cheap production values of the film and the fact that this scene is shot in Strong Bad's basement, the villain is simply kicked into a dryer which is covered in aluminum foil to look like an airlock.
• Played with in Xenosaga at the beginning. You have no way of dealing damage to the gnosis, and the only way to get through a particular room, is to get up on a safe ledge, and open the airlock, but only enough to blow air out. This blows a bunch of explosive crates towards it, as well as the gnosis. The crates explode, destroying the gnosis, and then you hit the button again to shut the airlock doors so you can continue on.
• This is the fate of every group of employees in Lethal Company when the mysterious Company itself detects a poor performance. It doesn't matter if you and your team were actually incompetent enough to fail to meet the low profit quota on their first week on the job, or if you've been raking in thousands of credits in spite of near-impossible odds and dangerous monsters in your way, one missed profit quota means you and your team must now undergo the Company's 'disciplinary process' and be cast into the vacuum of space as your execution.

Webcomics

• In 8-Bit Theater an old man is shoved out of an airlock, of an airship, by the heroes, for being annoying.
• In a Biter Comics strip the captain orders a prisoner's execution in this manner. A crew member obliges in a bit too literal sense, attempting to actually throw the prisoner out.
• Buck Godot Zapgun For Hire: The first sign that a species isn't welcome in the Gallimaufry station's sector is their entire embassy aboard the station getting ejected into space through its airlock-roof. It also seems to be the local Sufficiently Advanced Alien's preferred execution method when he doesn't just disintegrate the offender.
• The Gazelles in Commander Kitty do this to Nin Wah in the most inconsiderate, irresponsible, Jerkass way possible. After she's convicted (of not paying a hotel bill), it turns out they can't afford to lock her up due to budget cuts and instead sentence her to 15 minutes of community service. Which happens to involve cleaning up outside the space station, without a spacesuit (also due to budget cuts). Hey, they had to pay for Frank's party somehow; the guy got promoted last week!
• Cap'n Crosby from Far Out There is known to threaten people with this. And he'll do it, too.
• Parodied in Intragalactic. Being blown out the airlock is how the crew maroons stowaways.
  —"We set down on the nearest habitable planet and blow you out the airlock with a big fan. Very humiliating."
• Narbonic, parodying "The Cold Equations", has Mell space Dave. She lets him back in after learning from Helen that explosive decompression is a myth.
• Quentyn gets tossed into space in one Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger strip. But due to his low-profile spacesuit, he survives.
  • Another arc rips apart the premise of "The Cold Equations"; fortunately, Quentyn happened to be passing by and saved the girl before she asphyxiated. So she was able to testify at the shipping company's trial.
• In Schlock Mercenary, Petey dumps a bunch of Space Marines out of an airlock that wasn't there until he boarded the ship. (He didn't just cut a hole; he "installed" a complete airlock.) But the marines are all wearing Powered Armor, so they should be able to reach one of the other ships nearby. It's also what LOTA threatens to do if the Toughs get too close to his memory banks (he's justified; he found out they had a backup plan to assassinate him just in case).
• In one of the fillers for S.S.D.D., the misconceptions about throwing people out the airlock were addressed, apparently spacing is a slow and painful way to die and they just stay in the airlock until poked with a stick, though if you have a window in the airlock, you can watch them WRIGGLE!!
• Happens several times in Vexxarr, but since all but one of the crew can easily survive in hard vacuum, it's usually Played for Laughs.

Web Original

• Cortana in Arby 'n' the Chief was thrown into the centre of an alien sun after a gay alien that looks suspiciously like the creator of the show's chin raped and ate her friends Travis and Todd.
• Occasionally happens to characters in Chakona Space. Though in at least one story, the appropriately named Briar Patch, the "victims" were genetically engineered to survive in vacuum (the pirates whose space suits they cut open, not so much).
• Played for Laughs multiple times in Deep Space 69 as Jay's preferred way of getting rid of his ex-girlfriends.
• A gentle example in The Jenkinsverse when Xiù Chang does this to Zane without letting him notice that they're not in space, it's just night-time and they're hovering above a river.
• The Journal Entries subvert this with a Pendorian sculptor using her final life support layer to allow her to walk around on an airless moon of a gas giant completely naked.
• Happens frequently in Space Tree. Usually to Allon.
• Played for Laughs in Starbarians Episode 3, where Killgar tricks the unnamed female servant on his ship, the DD Rex, into doing this to herself after being asked for a raise. She survives, but quits after being fed up with how poorly the Starbarians treat people.
• In the series finale of Wolf 359, this is the ultimate fate of Kepler after his Heel–Face Turn.

Western Animation

• Half-happened on Codename: Kids Next Door, where Cree is tricked into going into a trash-disposal pod before getting locked in and shot out.
• Dogstar: The Primes attempt to flush Alice and Zeke out of an airlock in "Titanium Chef". Their plan backfires and they end up being cast into space instead.
• Futurama: In "The Sting", after Fry and Leela are fatally stabbed by a space bee's stinger, Bender quickly grabs the bee and ejects it out the airlock, where it's splattered by a passing space truck.
• Exo Squad: During the climax of "The Last Man," a hangar door is openend and a Neo Mega ends up in the vacuum of space, while several memebrs of the ExoFleet nearly join him. Later, in "Flesh Crawls," a shape-shifter opens a hangar door, which results in two pirates being spaced and Maggie Weston nearly joining them.
• Used in Invader Zim:
  Almighty Tallest Purple: And we all remember how [Zim] messed up Operation: Impending Doom I, am I right?
  Irken among the public: I don't.
  Almighty Tallest Purple: SEIZE THAT GUY, AND um... throw him out the airlock!
  [Two Irken guards in jetpacks jump out and then a shriek of terror is heard together with the sounds of a hatch opening and violent wind]
  Almighty Tallest Purple: That was the wrong guy but... that's okay! I think everyone gets the point!
• Johnny Bravo: In the episode "Bootman", Johnny takes the boots of a superhero called the Green Swoosh after accidentally incapacitating him and is subsequently brought to a meeting of the Astounding League of Super-People at their headquarters in space. Johnny has no interest in participating in the upcoming fight against Man Boy and attempts to press what he thinks is the button that will get him home. In spite of the leader Mr. Elastic's warnings that Johnny shouldn't touch the button, Johnny presses it anyway and the other superheroes get shot into space.
  Johnny: Good thing there's plenty of air in space. Wait, no there isn't.
• Justice League:
  • While Flash is fighting a mook in a spacesuit in "Maid of Honor", the latter opens the airlock sending them both out into space. The mook pulls himself back in with a safety line, but Flash would have died if not for Green Lantern. Once he gets back in, Flash is understandably unhappy, and proceeds to take it out on the crew in about five seconds.
  • Lex Luthor does this to Grodd in "Alive!". As far as last words go, "You twisted pink rabble of a hominid, I'm not done with you! I'll get out of this and when I do...!" are some of the better ones.
    Luthor: Goodbye, Grodd. It could have gone the other way.
    Grodd: It really could have, couldn't it?
    Luthor: No, but why speak ill of the dead? [opens airlock]
• Happens rather accidentally to either Jeebs or his brother (or both?) in an episode of Men in Black: The Series.
• Rick and Morty: This is how Evil Morty disposes of dozens of other Ricks and Mortys, dead or alive, once he becomes President of the Citadel in "The Ricklantis Mix-up".
• Robot Chicken: During a Star Wars parody, Darth Vader gets rid of Jar Jar Binks, who is annoying him, by throwing him into an "escape pod" (Jar Jar notes that there's no pod, because it's the airlock), and jettisoning him out, causing Jar Jar to freeze to death in space. Unfortunately for Vader, Jar Jar comes back as a Force Ghost, and now Vader can't shut him up.
• The Simpsons:
  • Averted when Homer goes up in the Space Shuttle in "Deep Space Homer" by the heroic action of an inanimate carbon rod.
  • Homer accidentally jettisons the two presidential candidates out of Kang and Kodos' ship in "Treehouse of Horror VII".
  • Bart and Homer deliberately space themselves when their rocket (full of Earth's most irritating people) isn't flying into the sun fast enough in "Treehouse of Horror X".
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • "Envoys": Rutherford is taking a command test and, at the suggestion of Commander Ransom, uses the "Janeway Protocol", which ends up somehow venting an entire classroom of children into space. Ransom stops the simulation, expresses shock at the fact that this was the first time ever seeing that before... before setting up another simulation with even MORE children!
  • "Terminal Provocations": Mariner and Boimler deal with the corrupted isolinear core by hauling it to and out an airlock when it becomes too massive for them to drag it to the transporter.
  • "Much Ado About Boimler": After he rats out their attempt mutiny, the mutants try to do this to Boimler. Fortunately for him, the ship had just touched down on a planet, so he merely ends up lying in a field holding his breath.
  • "The Spy Humongous": A very poor Pakled spy decides to slip away from Ransom and Kayshon to use the restroom. Unfortunately, he mistakes an airlock for the restroom and when he goes to "flush", he's shot out into space. Amazingly, he's somehow resilient enough to survive. Or just too stupid to realize better.
  • "I, Excretus": Mariner is put through a simulated test with the crew acting on the infamous polywater intoxication incidents. For the test, this means a massive orgy. She is so disturbed by this she willingly vents herself and the crew just to end the test.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • "Rising Malevolence": After the destruction of Plo Koon's warships, the Separatists, in an attempt to keep their new warship, the Malevolence, secret, deploy "pod hunters" (specialized battle droids on a repurposed Boarding Pod) to crack open escape pods, with anyone inside sucked into space. Plo, Commander Wolffe, Sinker and Boost see this happen from their pod. When they are spotted by the pod hunters, Plo leads Sinker and Boost outside to fight them off, as the two clones' armour will protect them for a bit, and Plo's Kel Dor physiology allows him to withstand the vacuum for a short time.
  • "Cargo of Doom": Cad Bane threatens to do this to Ahsoka to get Anakin to open a holocron. When the airlock does open, it features the typical gale-force winds, and Ahsoka is almost sucked out.
  • "Death Trap": At the end, Aurra Sing orders Boba Fett to do this to a trio of clone cadets in an escape pod. Boba instead chooses to release the cadets, leaving them alive in their non-functional pod to be found by the Jedi shortly thereafter.
• Star Wars Rebels:
  • "Rebel Resolve": Chopper exfiltrates himself from an Imperial cruiser by opening a nearby hatch (one without an airlock) and letting himself get sucked out where the Ghost is waiting to recover him. Chopper's fine because he's a droid. The nearby squad of stormtroopers that got sucked out with him? Not so much.
  • "Brothers of the Broken Horn": Azmorigan threatens to do this to Ezra and Hondo, via a conveyor belt that flings people out of a hangar forcefield. One of his guards gets subjected to it instead. Hondo nearly gets thrown out, but Ezra saves him with the Force.
  • "Blood Sisters": Chopper gets sucked into space when Ketsu shoots out the hatch of Sabine's stolen shuttle. He takes the opportunity to jet over to Ketsu's spacecraft and sabotage her weapons array.
  • "The Forgotten Droid": Chopper gets rid of the stormtroopers on the Imperial freighter by luring them into the cargo bay and jettisoning it.
  • "The Holocrons of Fate": Darth Maul attempts to kill Kanan by blowing him out of an airlock unawares. Kanan manages to make it back inside within a minute.
  • "Double Agent Droid":
    • An Imperial-controlled Chopper attempts to kill the crew by opening the forward hatch of the Ghost's cargo bay. They just barely manage to hang on before Hera uses the manual override to close it.
    • While AP-5 is attempting to bypass security protocols on the outer hull, Chopper flies out and shoves him off, causing him to drift uncontrollably. Like Chopper, he's fine. In fact, he was starting to enjoy it before the Ghost came back for him.
  • "Zero Hour": Kallus deliberately goads Governor Pryce into ordering him thrown out an airlock, which gives him the perfect opportunity to escape the Chimaera by getting him off the bridge, and he proceeds to overpower his guards and leave in an escape pod, which is picked up by the Ghost before their departure.
• Star Wars Resistance: In "Into the Unknown", Kaz and Torra dispose of a stowaway First Order BB unit on the Colossus this way, blowing it into space.
• Steven Universe: In "Back to the Moon", Sardonyx uses her hammer to smash the fused Ruby Squad out of the moon base airlock. Unfortunately, as the squad defuses, one of them (Eyeball) manages to grab Steven and taking him with them. The following episode goes on consist entirely of Dramatic Space Drifting.
• Tiny Toons Looniversity: In "Tooned in Space" Marvin the Martian takes the cast into space, where they get shot at by aliens. A hole is blown in the ship, and all the air is being sucked out, nearly taking the crew with it.
• At the end of the Superman: The Animated Series two-part episode "The Main Man", this is how Superman and Lobo manage to escape the Preserver's ship.
• How Optimus Prime defeats a heavily damaged Megatron in the first episode of Transformers: Animated. It should be noted that Megatron was thrown out while entering the Earth's atmosphere, and that is quite hazardous to the health of even a Cybertronian. It takes Allspark energy to fully restore him in the first season finale.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Brock is nearly blown into space without a space suit when a space station hatch opens — being Brock, he survives, but coughs up something big.
  • The same episode makes mention of an incident known as "Movie Night". When a crazed crew-member invited the staff to watch Sharky's Machine. And then flushed the lot out the same bay door. Jonas Venture being one of them.
    • The above is how Manstrong (the apparent Sole Survivor) retells the events of Movie Night, but Season 7 gives some more context, as provided by Red Death, one of the other survivors of Movie Night. A group of Guild villains, including Red Death and Vendata, got the idea to disguise themselves as crew members, sneak aboard Jonas Venture's space station, and arch him on the one day all of its crew could be found in one place, but none of them intended for things to happen the way they did. Jonas is found by Vendata, and Jonas recognizes him before heading to see the movie. After that, it's heavily implied that Vendata was the one to open the airlock.
• Wander over Yonder: Lord Dominator does this to her Mooks when they disappoint her.
• The fate of The Mole in the Wing Commander Academy episode "Red and Blue", Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves.

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