"I feel fully charged, as if electricity and not blood were running through my veins. I just want to make sure I experience and remember everything."
Those are the words of astronaut Luca Parmitano, remembering his final moments before the fateful spacewalk that almost saw him drown in his own spacesuit.
On 16 July, during a routine spacewalk, the Italian astronaut found his helmet filling up with water, simultaneously threatening his life and also introducing a whole new area of fear into the realm of space travel. As well as worrying about drifting off into the dark abyss, or your spacesuit depressurising, now the threat of space helmets filling with water has been added to the public consciousness.
Now, in a blog post posted on 20 August, Parmitano has described the experience in excruciating, chilling and sometimes wry detail.
The aim of his July spacewalk with Nasa astronaut Chris Cassidy was to plug in cables on the exterior of the International Space Station and then secure those cables with small metal wires. "I know from experience that this will be really tiring because of the pressurised gloves," he writes. Working in an extremely confined space, with just centimetres between himself and the ISS, Parmitano initially makes good progress and is 40 minutes ahead of schedule. He and Chris Cassidy are working in different areas outside the ISS.
Suddenly, as he's moving out of the confined space, he notices something frightening: "the unexpected sensation of water at the back of my neck surprises me." "And I'm in a place where I'd rather not be surprised," he jokes, as if he were in a McDonalds at 3am, rather than kilometres above the Earth in space.
At first he thinks it might be drinking water from his flask, or perhaps an accumulation of sweat (eww), but those innocent possibilities are quickly dismissed: "I can feel it increasing."
It's time to abort.
Parmitano is forced to make his way back to the airlock by himself, as his partner Cassidy has to make sure everything they were working on is secure. The water floating around his helmet has reached his ears and is now covering the front of his visor. As retraces his steps back to safety, Parmitano is forced to turn himself vertically so as to get past one of the space station's antennae. What follows is the most terrifying moment of the entire ordeal. "At that moment, as I turn 'upside-down', two things happen: the Sun sets, and my ability to see -- already compromised by the water -- completely vanishes, making my eyes useless; but worse than that, the water covers my nose -- a really awful sensation that I make worse by my vain attempts to move the water by shaking my head," he writes in his blogpost. "By now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can't even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid."
In this desperate situation, he contemplates the possibility of depressurising his suit as a last resort to remove the water.
Parmitano was thankfully able to make it back to the ISS without "making a 'hole' in [his] spacesuit" as he puts it. It was later confirmed that the source of the water was his spacesuit's cooling system.
He ends his blog post with a message that we have to respect the fact that we are "explorers, not colonisers" of the harsh environment of space. "The skills of our engineers and the technology surrounding us make things appear simple when they are not, and perhaps we forget this sometimes," Parmitano writes. "Better not to forget."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
