An Astronaut Just Posted A Story About That Time He Nearly Drowned In Space. It Is Terrifying.

In July of this year, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and American astronaut Chris Cassidy were sent outside of the International Space Station for a routine repair mission. But, in what turned out to be an extremely harrowing experience, the mission was cut short after something went very wrong.

Overnight, Parmitano posted an extremely descriptive and harrowing account of exactly what happened to the European Space Agency website. “My eyes are closed as I listen to Chris counting down the atmospheric pressure inside the airlock,” it begins. “It’s close to zero now.”

That’d be more than enough for me to turn in my NASA badge. But it gets so much worse.

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The part where space is the worst:

When I read 0.5 psi, it’s time to turn the handle and pull up the hatch. It is pitch black outside, not the colour black but rather a complete absence of light.

The part where it starts to go wrong;

At this exact moment, just as I’m thinking about how to uncoil the cable neatly (it is moving around like a thing possessed in the weightlessness), I ‘feel’ that something is wrong. 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.

Really wrong:

As I move back along my route towards the airlock, I become more and more certain that the water is increasing. I feel it covering the sponge on my earphones and I wonder whether I’ll lose audio contact. The water has also almost completely covered the front of my visor, sticking to it and obscuring my vision. 

The part where we are reminded that all of this is happening in SPACE:

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. 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. To make matters worse, I realise that I can’t even understand which direction I should head in to get back to the airlock.

The part where — blind and deaf — he has to make it back to the airlock somehow, fast:

I force myself to stay calm and, patiently locating the handles by touch, I start to move, all the while thinking about how to eliminate the water if it were to reach my mouth. The only idea I can think of is to open the safety valve by my left ear: if I create controlled depressurisation, I should manage to let out some of the water, at least until it freezes through sublimation, which would stop the flow. But making a ‘hole’ in my spacesuit really would be a last resort.

The part where he considers taking the helmet off:

Now that we are repressurizing, I know that if the water does overwhelm me I can always open the helmet. I’ll probably lose consciousness, but in any case that would be better than drowning inside the helmet.

The last paragraph:

Space is a harsh, inhospitable frontier and we are explorers, not colonisers. The skills of our engineers and the technology surrounding us make things appear simple when they are not, and perhaps we forget this sometimes.

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According to a video posted in July by Cassidy, there are a number of ways liquid could have made it into the suit; sweat, the water supply, or cooling tubes woven into the fabric. It turns out the ventilation connector was to blame.

Read the full story here. If you feel like torturing yourself after that, watch the trailer for Gravity.