Does Water Boil or Freeze in Vacuum of Space? (Patreon)

This was originally going to be part of the ‘hydrovac BUSTED’ video, but it was so awesome I really just had to put it out on its own! The rate limiting step on the evaporative cooling is how quickly you can get rid of the water vapor that comes off the water. Water vapor, like virtually all gases travels at the speed of sound, so getting a rotary pump that can pull this off is virtually impossible. Here I use cryopumping (essentially condensing all the water vapor that touches the cold end of the kit at -50C) to achieve a pumping rate of about the speed of sound!  This is actually fairly comparable to the rate of evaporation you would get in space. The practical upshot is water can be seen to go from ‘boiling’ to freezing in about 7 second! Cool!! :-)