I almost drowned in space when my helmet filled with water

When the water hit my face, it spread over my nose and up into my nostrils in no time. I almost went blind, I couldn’t hear anything and I couldn’t breathe through my nose. I already knew I had to get to the airlock and get back to the International Space Station. The key question: how long did I have before water got into my mouth and I couldn’t breathe at all?

When you go on a spacewalk, you enter a new world. It’s an incredibly privileged view. Inside the ISS and looking through the dome windows, you still inhabit the safe world of the space station. It’s like staring into a big and really beautiful aquarium. But when I leave the ISS for a spacewalk, I’m immersed in a void. I’m in an environment that doesn’t need me. If I wasn’t in a spacesuit, I would be dead in minutes.

The endless horizon of stars and darkness is so vivid. On one of my spacewalks, I was moved from one side of the space station to the other on a robotic arm. I was attached to my arms and legs. I had no frame of reference because the space station was behind me, the Earth was behind me. And for the first time in my life, I perceived the three-dimensionality of space. Maybe it was because I was drawing on my knowledge of astrophysics, but I felt like I was seeing this spongy tissue of bubbles or cavities surrounded by all these massive light sources. I’ve been trying to relive that moment ever since. But I didn’t succeed.

I have completed six spacewalks so far. The water broke during my second day on July 16, 2013. It was definitely uncomfortable when I first felt the cold liquid on the back of my neck. But then of course I still went through the standard procedure. I called to the ground, “Hey, I can smell water in the back of my helmet, FYI – FYI.” “FYI” I said: I’m still good and I’m still ready to continue going into space.

I was told to wait for instructions. Then they asked if I knew where the water was coming from. I don’t. But I could already feel it building up. Water behaves differently when you remove the effects of gravity. Capillarity works really well move it from one place to another across the surface.

When a lot of people think of a space suit, they think of movies like Gravitation or Martian. The helmets in those movies are really big. You paid $100 million to have a particular actor, so you need a big helmet to see his face. Nobody wants to see my face, so our helmets are relatively small. There isn’t much space between the helmet and my face. There was water flowing in this small space and it was filling quite quickly. After my ears got blocked, I couldn’t hear much and I also started to realize that even the people on the ground couldn’t hear me.

Then the sun went down. As you fly around the Earth, you have a sunset and sunrise every 45 minutes. A spacewalk takes about six to seven hours, so much of it is done at night. A complicating factor was the sunset. Even through the water I could see what was right in front of me thanks to the illumination from the lights on the helmet. But the moment I tried to look further, I couldn’t make out anything. I couldn’t focus on distant objects with water in front of my eyes.

I still didn’t know where the water was coming from. But it wasn’t important at that moment. The important thing was that I had this ticking timer telling me to act. I have maybe 10 minutes left. Or 5 minutes. Or even just 1 minute. I couldn’t control it, but I could control my behavior.

Before I became an astronaut I was a pilot, then I became a fighter pilot and then a test pilot. On my first day of flight school, I learned that there are three actions to take in an emergency: maintain control, analyze the situation, and take appropriate action.

The right move was to find a way back to the airlock. The next step was figuring out how to do it. There are grips on the outside of the space station that help us move around. I knew I could use them to reach the airlock. I asked myself: do I see another handle? I can’t see it, it’s too far. Can I find out where it is by reaching out and feeling it? i can Following my tether, anchored in the airlock, I can start moving in the right direction.

But moving in a spacesuit is harder than you probably think. The suit is pressurized and that pressure is a force that acts against your muscles. In order to move, you have to fight that force. And your hands and fingers, there are no strong muscles. So every time you want to hold an object like a handle, the forces are so strong that it feels like you have to squeeze a tennis ball.

That last part of the spacewalk felt like a very long time, an eternity. My mind slowed everything down. In fact it was only 7 minutes before I was back in the airlock. In those 7 minutes, they didn’t hear me on the ground and didn’t know how I was doing. But I later found out that they didn’t realize I was in trouble because my heart rate never changed. It remained stable. I checked my answer.

I can still relive that spacewalk, but it’s not in my head all the time. It’s not something that changed me, although it changed us all operationally. We determined that the malfunction was caused by a blocked filter, so we changed our procedures to look for this before the spacewalk. We also added a snorkel to the space suits, so if the helmet fills with water, we can use the snorkel to breathe from the air in the body chamber. So this event will never happen again. That’s silver.

I would never agree with someone saying that what astronauts do is special. What we are able to do is extraordinary. But that doesn’t make us special people. It makes us ordinary people who are trained to do extraordinary work.

As told to Colin Barras

topics:

• International Space Station/
• astronaut