Talia is wondering what would happen to an astronaut who goes outside the spaceship in a spacesuit and lets one rip?!
Any physicists out there who can give her more information beyond the farting-is-funny cartoons?
And as far as Talia goes, as she will stay inside the ship, all she risks is blushing under the accusatory looks of her cabin mates wrinkling their noses....
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Answer: The suit will get stunk up.
Farting inside your spacesuit is like having birds flying in the back of your van, the forces will all balance out.
This is not a great answer. The way a rocket works is you have lots of high pressure gas molecules bouncing off one end exerting a force on it. In turn the rocket exerts a force on the molecules sending them the other way. Now the other end is open, so any molecules heading that direction pass out of the rocket. There is thus a unbalanced force on the rocket propelling it forward. Now suppose that this occurs in space. In this case, no external forces are acting on the rocket + gas system, so no matter how far apart the two get, their center of mass must remain fixed in space.
So, in the shuttle, you'd expect that if you expelled gas, you'd be propelled forward, and the gas backwards. Of course, it's such a small effect, but still theoretically you'd go shooting off until you hit a wall, and the gas would go shooting off until it hit a wall. Also, in this case the gas explusion is not quite as focused as the rocket. The net result is when all of this stuff hits the rocket walls they all exert forces potentially at different times and in different directions. Still, those are forces internal to the astronaut + rocket + gas system, and as such the center of mass has to stay fixed.
Now, consider that the suit + astronaut + gas is the exact same situation except that the suit is much smaller, and you have little or no wiggle room around your center of mass.
This all is in consideration that you are fixed when you fart. If the system's center of mass is moving at a constant velocity, it continues to do so, in the absence of an external force. This is always true for a collection of particles. That doesn't mean that the particles can't exert forces on each other, and rearrange themselves about their center of mass.