Space travel is often compared to deep-sea exploration. The crew is trapped in a cramped capsule with its thick, well-sealed walls all that separate them from an environment that can kill them instantly should it all fall apart. Both have thick protective apparel that can be worn for walks outside those protective vehicles.
Obviously, there’s a lot of overlap. You probably wouldn’t think the two would overlap so much that there would be such a thing as an astronaut drowning in his spacesuit while on a spacewalk.
Yet that’s exactly what happened to Luca Parmitano.
The Terrifying Spacewalk Where an Astronaut Almost Drowned
During a 2013 spacewalk outside the International Space Station, which he is only now detailing to New Scientist, a little bit of liquid he felt sloshing around in the back of his head turned into a situation in which he nearly drowned while floating in the waterless vacuum of space.
In microgravity, water doesn’t drip. It beads up, clings together, and floats around us in little globules. If you’ve ever sprinkled a little water on a well-heated stainless-steel pan, those little globs of water that frictionlessly skate around the surface would be skating around your head if they were loose in your space helmet.
Within minutes, it covered his eyes, filled his ears, and pushed into his nose. He couldn’t see, hear, or communicate to anyone that he was drowning.
By now, we’ve all seen at least a handful of movies and shows about astronauts brilliantly scrambling under pressure as they fight to survive in an environment that wants them dead. Parmitano didn’t panic. He stuck to the fundamentals of his training. He couldn’t see, so he grabbed hold of his tether and navigated around by touch, moving from handle to handle across the station’s exterior over the course of a slow, interminable, agonizing seven minutes.
Astronauts don’t typically have to deal with their helmets being instantly converted into fish bowls. It turns out a clogged filter in his suit cooling system caused water to back up into the helmet. Spacewalks are already highly risky operations that expose astronauts to several life-threatening hazards, including radiation, the risk of being hit by micrometeoroids, and the possibility of their pressurized suits failing. In this case, one of the suit’s life-support functions turned on Parmitano, and he had to calmly scramble to save his life.
He made it back into the ISS before becoming the first person and possibly the last person in human history to drown in space. Once inside, they discovered the block filter and probably changed procedures to check for that before spacewalks. He says they also added a snorkel-like device to the spacesuits so an astronaut could have a backup way to access the air circulating in the suit’s body chamber in case something like that happened again.
If you’ve seen movies or shows like Apollo 13, For All Mankind, Gravity, The Martian, and most recently, Project Hail Mary, you’ve seen mostly fictional accounts of how dangerous space travel and exploration can be. It’s not too far off from the truth of it. It’s something astronauts just have to endure because each new peril teaches new lessons that can make the next voyage safer.
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