Short answer: you'll suffocate to death, and possibly have time to feel a case of the bends. You won't freeze until long after you're dead.

Long answer: As far as freezing go, depending on where you are, you may actually heat up, or you may freeze, but that happens much slower than your agonizing suffocation.

If you are in earth orbit, and you have a direct view of the sun, you'll get the worst sunburn of your life. Exposed to the sun without the shielding effect of the atmosphere, you will be exposed to raw unfiltered sunlight. That will be worse than frying the beach on a cloudless day on the equator. You will definitely not freeze to death that way.

If you are in the shade however, or too far away from the sun, you'll slowly freeze, at about the rate things freeze on a cloudless night with no wind. Heat will radiate away from your body, but since there is no air around you, there is no convection that can take heat away from you.

But again, you won't freeze to death because you'll suffocate before that happens.

Either way, death is quick -- within tenths of a second, faster than nerves can react thus quite a painless and humane death.

@28 - Gravity.

At first this did not sound right, but it just struck me that a thermos bottle with a near vacuum in its sealed chamber slows down the loss of heat energy from the inner lining and liquid, so the poster is right. Of course, he pointed out correctly that radiant heat loss would still take place.

I have learned more from this series of posts than I could ever have imagined.

If you were to put a thermometer in space, it would measure the temperature of the thermometer, not space. There is no matter in empty space, so there cannot be any temperature.

The reason spacecrafts become cold is that heat is radiated off of them. Otherwise, there would be too much heat energy stored on the spacecraft and it could combust or cause sever damage to electrical components.

If there is no matter, there cannot be energy.

Even with the sun's heat and energy from other stars, there will only be heat were there is matter to collect it. This is why Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is closer to the sun. Venus has an atmosphere to collect heat, whereas Mercury does not.

Temperature has no meaning in empty space. By the way, I am 15 years old.

Temperature of space is 1.21 x 10^44 Kelvins.

However, i cannot find anything that explains to me why the space is cold in the first place? Why isn't it like, say room temperature?

Room temperature is an example only, and to reach room temperature, i need to turn up the heat in the winter, and turn on my air cooler in the summer.

Now, the reason i need to add heat to reach room temperature in the winter, is obviously because it's cold outside. It's cold outside because the sun is so low on the horizon.

As I've come to understand, the space itself wouldn't have a temperature unless there was mass there to measure the temperature of.

Lets say i had a ton of empty space, no suns, no remnants of a big bang, no other energy, just a total vacuum. Then put a brick in the middle of that. What temperature would i be able to measure on that rock, and why?

what is the temperature around the satellite if there are no temperature controls (i.e temperature of the part which is facing the sun and which is in the shadow region - with and without facing the sun).

That does not mean that the potential for temperature increase does not exist. Radiation from stars has the ability to transfer its energy when it strikes matter thus causing an increase in the energy of that matter and a temperature increase. This increase is based on many factors including the type of radiation from the stars that reach the object, the intensity and density (related to proximity) as well as the molecular make up of the object being struck by the radiation, even the texture of the surface can have an influence on the energy absorbed by the object.

Since outer space is mostly empty there are very little molecules for which the radiation from stars to transfer its energy to, so the temperature of space is very low.

Also, if we are (for instance) in a space ship and a door opens, why would the air inside of it and in our body be vacuumed out?

Friction is another catalyst but the heat is not caused directly by things rubbing together but rather from the way the molecules react to the friction. Again they speed up and end up producing heat as a result.

In the case of the sun, the more intense the radiation (proximity, density, angle) and the more direct contact, the more molecules react and the hotter they become.

Looking at a microwave, you can easily see that different types of molecules react differently to different catalysts.

Electronics work optimally in a vacuum, so satellites don't have a problem, especially since they are heated using their solar panels! The slower molecules move, the higher the temperature, and vice versa.