I remember seeing several instances where spacecraft (i.e. ISS) had small holes in them and they were fine (NASA even didn’t wake astronauts once). Since the pressure difference is so great (space is a vacuum), how come there’s no explosive decompression (all the air is sucked out at once)?
In: Physics
Fill a compressor with air, a big one with a 20 gallon tank, at 100 psi. Open the drain valve, which is like punching a small hole. It’s going to take some time to empty the tank, maybe a minute, to equalize the 20 gallons of 100 psi with the outdoor 14.7 psi. You’ll notice it starts coming out really fast at high pressure, and then goes more slowly as the pressure differential between the tank and the air gets lower.
Looking it up, the ISS is effectively a 241,867 gallon air tank at 14.7 psi. You have to equalize the pressure of all that at 14.7 psi to 0 psi, which is going to take a long time with a small hole. The pressure difference is also not nearly as high, so the air won’t be pushed out nearly as fast as with the compressor early on.
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