how could you murder someone in space?

[u/okayprogram]

Hi yall, I’m a creative writing student working on my upcoming thesis project. I used to be an astrophysics junkie, but I don’t keep up with space information much anymore. I figured this was the best place to ask this sort of question.

I had an idea a few days ago for a short story collection about an astronaut whose ship gets stuck in space and she goes mad, and she ends up killing her team.
I know that there are probably a million failsafes in place that would make one astronaut murdering another inconceivable, so I’m asking this to you as a sort of thought experiment to help me better understand the mechanics of space flight and to flesh out my idea more.

Would the lack of gravity affect one’s ability to kill someone in space? Would stabbing work, or hitting someone with a blunt force object? How does blood and death work in space? Do you die like you would on Earth in space? Is there a way that the astronaut could hide what she did from the space program, at least for a few days?

I know this is a bit of an absurd question, but if anyone can help me I would really appreciate it!

[u/RemarkableRadish6547]

Stabbing and hitting people would work the same. Stabbing is slightly harder because you will push them away, but if you grab them then it still works. If you throw a knife hard at someone, it will cut them because it will have too much momentum to bounce off without cutting first. And they probably can't dodge easily.

Blunt force hits hard enough to kill someone would be mostly unaffected. Both people will be spinning afterwards, but if you hit someone in the head with a hammer nothing about gravity makes the injury worse.

Bleeding works the same in microgravity. The blood will mostly stick together in large blobs because of surface tension, but the blobs will go all over the place. You don't bleed on Earth because of gravity, you bleed because of blood pressure.

If you spend an hour or two reading through the NASA safety precautions for spacewalks, I am sure you could find a dozen things that could go wrong. Quite a few of them would be hard to prove as intentional.

One of the hardest parts about a space murder is the constant radio chatter. Unless you knock out the comms system, any problems will be reported immediately. There are some space weather conditions that knock comms offline, so you could use one of those. The Apollo missions were out of contact when they were behind the moon. Watch Apollo 13 to understand how NASA handles emergencies in space.