Naive question; feel free to shoot me down
It is a truism that any motion in space would continue indefinitely unless it is opposed by an external force. If a cosmonaut were to sneeze within his/her spacesuit, would it have any impact upon their movement? I assume the suit and cosmonaut would, between them, totally absorb the force exerted by the 100mph sneeze air velocity. This would leave the cosmonaut unaffected ... probably.
Answer
When the cosmonaut sneezed they would start moving, and rotating, in the opposite direction, but when the sneeze hit their faceplate (ugh!) this would stop the motion. The net result is that the velocity of the cosmonaut would not have changed, but their position and angle would have.
According to Wikipedia a typical breath is 500cm$^3$ and a sneeze velocity is around 15m/s. If the density of air is about 1.2kg/m$^{3}$ the momentum of a sneeze is about 0.009kg.m/s. I weight about 70kg, so the sneeze would leave me moving at about 0.0013m/s. Lets say the faceplate is 5cm away from my mouth, then with the sneeze moving at 15m/s I'd only move for 0.0033s before the sneeze hit my faceplate (ugh again!) and stopped me. In that time I'd have moved about 4 microns.
I must admit that's less than I thought when I started this.
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