I thought I'd point out the fact that "boiling" in space occurs at lower temperatures because of the lack of pressure. Water boils on Earth at 212f/100c (at sea level) because of atmospheric pressure. In space there is no pressure so it boils at a much lower temperature (and I have no idea what that temperature is).

I'm posting this not to refute whether or not blood boils in space but in response to a few posts that seemed to indicate heat was necessary for boiling.

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The Brain Science Podcast

Well, lots of dramatic stuff is certainly going on, but if animal studies are anything to go by, gas evolution in the venous and pulmonary circulation will hasten your already rapid demise, and does increase the physiological insult beyond that of "mere" anoxia.
If you breathe 100% nitrogen at sea-level pressures, or rapidly decompress to 55mmHg ambient while breathing air, then what you see is a prompt loss of circulating oxygen, a prompt rise in heart-rate followed by a slower decline, and a more gradual rise in the various vascular pressures: arterial, systemic venous, and pulmonary. Blood circulation continues for a minute or more.
But if you decompress to 2 mmHg, you see the vascular pressures reverse their usual relationship within about 10s: venous and pulmonary pressures rise dramatically, and arterial pressures drop to less than the venous pressure. Circulation stops, in that sort of timescale. What's happening is that the evolved vapour on the low-pressure side of the circulation is blocking flow through the heart and lungs -- you have a compressible volume of gas in both atria, so the fluid pump fails.
If you snatch the experimental animals back from the brink and measure markers for tissue hypoxia, like lactate, the indications are that your tissues take a bigger hit, sooner, if gas ebullism is superimposed on anoxia.

The original work on this was done in the 1960s: see, for instance, Bancroft et al.'s Comparison of anoxia with and without ebullism, in the Journal of Applied Physiology; 25: 230-7.

Grant Hutchison

I see. I did not know that.

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Host of Seraphim

In effect, yes. A lot of experiments have been done exposing invasively monitored animals to sudden decompression: I described the results of one such set of experiments above.

Grant Hutchison

And humans; the Nazis tortured/experimented on people this way several times, and at least one person has been exposed by accident and recovered in 1965. He reported that the saliva on his tongue boiled.

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Really? I hadn't heard of that. I'd guess the "scientific" data collected were essentially non-existent, or I'd have run into some technical reference to them by now. The Nazi data for hypothermia and immersion have been examined, for instance, after much ethical debate which included discussion with survivors of Nazi experimentation.

Grant Hutchison

According to Wiki, the experiments were done in 1942 by Sigmund Rascher to determine the effects of high altitude on pilots. The victims were exposed to conditions simulating altitiude of 68,000 feet. Of the 200 people exposed, 80 died of the experiments, and the rest were killed afterwards.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Yeah, thanks, I tracked down some similar information by a bit of Googling. Rascher used a decompression chamber provided by the Luftwaffe, and installed at Dachau.
Decompression appears to have been relatively slow, to judge from an eye-witness account I won't post here. "Data collection" was by visual observation and dissection, so essentially anecdotal.

(Rascher was later arrested for kidnapping - or perhaps "illegal adoption" - in 1944, and wound up being held as a "special prisoner" at Dachau. He seems to have been shot in the head a few days before the liberation of Dachau by American forces.)

Grant Hutchison