ESA/NASA
Astronaut Luca Parmitano during a spacewalk on July 9, 2013
During his second spacewalk, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, from the European Space Agency, felt water running down his face — and knew he could be just moments away from drowning inside his helmet.
Space travel is often compared to exploring the depths of the sea: the crew is left trapped in a capsule small space, whose thick, hermetically sealed walls are all that separate it from a environment that can kill you instantly if something goes wrong.
In both cases, there are thick protective suits that can be used when traveling outside these protective vehicles.
It is clear that there are many points in common. What you probably wouldn’t imagine is that this similarity could go so far to the point that there is something like a astronaut drowning inside his spacesuit during a spacewalk.
This is what happened in 2013 to the Italian astronaut Luca Parmitanofrom the European Space Agency, who now told the episode to .
During a spacewalk outside the International Space Station, Parmitano felt a small amount of liquid shaking in the back of his head—something that turned into a situation where he came close to breaking down. drown, suspended in the waterless vacuum of space.
In microgravity, water does not drip. Form small spheresremains cohesive and floats around us in tiny globules.
If you’ve ever dropped some water into a very hot stainless steel frying pan, those little drops that slide almost without friction on the surface would be, in this case, floating around your headif they came loose inside the space helmet.
Within minutes, water covered Parmitano’s eyes, filled his ears and entered his nose. Couldn’t see, hear or communicate to anyone who was drowning.
By now, we’ve all seen at least a few films and series about astronauts who, under enormous pressureimprovise brilliantly to survive num environment that seems to want to kill them.
Parmitano didn’t panic. He stayed true to the basic principles of his training. Since I couldn’t see, grabbed the safety cableae guided by touch, advancing from catch to catch along the outer structure of the station for seven slow, endless and harrowing minutes.
Astronauts do not, as a rule, have to deal with the instantaneous transformation of helmets into authentic aquariums. What happened then? It turned out that a clogged filter in the cooling system The fact had caused the water to retreat into the helmet.
Spacewalks are, in themselves, high risk operationswhich expose astronauts to various potentially fatal hazardsincluding radiation, the risk of being hit by micrometeoroids and the possibility of failure of their pressurized suits.
In this case, one of the life support functions of the astronaut’s suit itself had been turned against Parmitanoand he had to act calmly to save his own life.
The Italian managed to return to the Space Station, thus avoiding becoming the first person, and possibly the lastthroughout the history of humanity, the drown in space.
