To make dinner, you'll have to stick your steak out of a window facing toward the sun where the "temperature" is something in the neighborhood of the boiling point of water (around 120 C). However you should turn your steak around pretty often because the shady side of the steak will be almost -100 C.

Bon appetit.

The UV and other radiation is pretty nasty up there. I wouldn't recommend going outside to get a tan. But then again, I wouldn't recommend going outside without a spacesuit on for any reason.

I seem to recall a Robert Heinlein story in which station wall thickness as radiation sheilding is discussed and an old space hand explains (paraphrasing) "you're better off with just enough skin to keep the air in".

Read Sci-Fi. It may save your life one day.

I think the R.H. reference was about secondary Bremsstrahlung radiation.

Hi MJB, I think it's a good comment and don't know why it's marked as "off-topic".

Sorry I can't give you a GA

I have a friend who was a payload specialist and flew on the shuttle. He said that without the suit, the UV from the sun would fry you like a piece of bacon in about twenty seconds. I think he meant that seriously.

Meaningless? Your complaining that a hypothetical question posted on an engineering forum that asks an easily grasped scenario as meaningless? Now one can certainly call this question silly, naive, humorous, unrealistic, or even surreal but you clearly grasped the meaning of this question by the fact that you've used the undefined acronym ISS. So for you to grasp the meaning of the question, it therefore cannot be meaningless.

therefore this goofy question is quite meaningless

Not very curious, are we? Goofy yes, but well worth the effort (you killjoy).

My questions address human survivability off-planet, touching on materials, biology, physiology, energy production-transmission-conservation, thermodynamics, and really everything scientific short of forestry. There's a potential connection there too if I take a moment to think about it.

Who designs the space suits? What do they need to know, and consider? Just how hazardous is it out there? My quick research indicates that we can survive exposure to vacuum for about a minute with potentially little lasting effect. But what about the radiation in space? People tend to gloss over that.

It turns out - as I suspected - that merely stepping outside of the ISS is (very) roughly the same as manipulating nuclear reactor cooling rods by hand.

<...ignoring the effects of the near-total vacuum and complete evaporation of water...>

The problem is, these things cannot be ignored. Even by vegetarians. _{"Vegetarianism" is an anagram of "meat in gravies", BTW.}

Is this why astronauts are given dried food?