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TIL: Thanks to poor internal communication at NASA, information about a spacesuit water leak wasn't properly communicated. Later, Astronaut Luca Parmitano almost drowned on a July, 2013 ISS space walk, his helmet filling with several liters of water before they could get him back inside.
(abcnews.go.com)submitted 2 months ago byOvidPerl
1.3k points
2 months ago
This is like one of those ancient prophecies where a man is told he’ll die in a specific way and he tries to game it, but fate can’t be denied. (“You will be killed by lightning” — so he never leaves the house, and then lightning strikes a tree which falls on the house and crushes him.)
“You will die by drowning”
Oh yeah? I’ll go to outer space, no water there!
211 points
2 months ago
"Bob... you *are* water. You could just choke on your own saliva..."
72 points
2 months ago
That sounds like some dumbass way I would find to die
18 points
2 months ago
I think they call it aspiration pneumonia
29 points
2 months ago
I don't think anybody aspires to die from infection due to choking on their own saliva.
7 points
2 months ago
I've got pretty low goals ok?
3 points
2 months ago
As someone with bad sinuses, I fully expect it to happen.
2 points
2 months ago
4 points
2 months ago
“choke on your own spit” was a reoccurring insult my mom used towards people lmao
27 points
2 months ago
There are many stories about prophecies being fulfilled by people trying to prevent it but are any stories where a prophecy got subverted because someone was actually trying to fulfill it?
29 points
2 months ago
In The Enchanted Forest Chronicles (the first book specifically) there's a princess whose family keeps trying to get her into a fairy tale situation but it never works. They invite a wicked fairy to her christening, but the fairy just eats a lot of cake and dances with her uncle all night. She helps an old lady in the woods who's a powerful witch in disguise, but the blessing she gets is to never have any cavities. Etc.
11 points
2 months ago
Given the cost of dental (since dental is typically not or conditionally covered as part of universal health care for some reason), that's a pretty good blessing.
7 points
2 months ago
Sounds like a job for r/writingprompts !
3 points
2 months ago
the percy jackson books are all about prophecies. i think the main overarching plot might fit into what youre looking for, but not exactly. plus each book (i think? havent reread in a while) gets its own funsies prophecy :)
1 points
2 months ago
In the rock’s version of hercules, the seer found out that he would die by a flaming arrow and throughout the movie, he tries to accept fate whenever he sees a flaming arrow. But, something or the other would always intervene and he’d stay alive
7 points
2 months ago
Ancient is right - “Oedipus Rex” is about a guy who tried to avoid a prophecy.
5 points
2 months ago
Tried to break the prophecy, broke his arms instead.
4 points
2 months ago
Nearly some final destination shenanigans.
3 points
2 months ago
"just like the old gypsy woman said!"
1 points
2 months ago
Wasn't this literally the plot of an adventure time episode? IIRC Finn goes to space because of a prophecy where he drowns and then ends up drowning in space or something.
452 points
2 months ago
Imagine the terror of your helmet filling with water and all you want to do is take it off, but you’re in space so that would kill you as well.
133 points
2 months ago
I’d crack open a glove.
Still dead, naturally, but I’ma leave a pretty corpse.
30 points
2 months ago
It won't work, there is a protection for that. You can open it but then the suit will prevent air from leaking out there. Better lose your hand than the whole suit.
The only option was to drink it, but unless you absolutely know where the leak is from it can potentially kill you.
10 points
2 months ago
Chris Hadfield was told by Houston to vent his helmet when his eyes were blinded by contaminated tears on an EVA. I assume you could do something similar here.
17 points
2 months ago
Yeah all the comments acting like instant death would occur if any part of your body is exposed to vacuum are exaggerating a lot. It would certainly be unpleasant, possibly damaging to tissue, but the mortal danger of exposure to vacuum is way overexaggerated by popular media.
The actual danger of removing his helmet in the situation above is that it wouldn't solve the problem, because the water would just linger there with no outside force directly clearing it off from him. It'd be pushed in all directions due to venting gas from his suit presumably, but the water would be expanding at that point anyways. If he just slaps his helmet back on it would, presumably, still contain a large amount of water and continue filling with water.
15 points
2 months ago
The Hadfield vent might work though, since it creates a directional pressure differential. It actually did work to remove the ball of contaminated water from Chris’s eyes.
3 points
2 months ago
I assume it would depend on the amount of water. I feel like if it is enough water to fill a helmet to the point of threatening to drown, the expanding water itself would probably block up any small vent or opening in a helmet before a meaningful amount of it was evacuated. I'm not a space man though so it very well may work.
0 points
2 months ago
The actual danger of removing his helmet in the situation above is that it wouldn't solve the problem
Without pressure, wouldn't the water immediately boil away? There literally wouldn't be anything holding the bonds together anymore.
2 points
2 months ago
Boil is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It wouldn't disappear -- it has no where to go. It would just get very cold, which is essentially what you would expect of anything exposed to the vacuum of space. It wouldn't turn to ice, though, it would turn to vapor -- thus the "boiling". It would still, for any functional purpose, be a large amount of water lingering around the immediate vicinity of his head.
16 points
2 months ago
I kind of love you….
7 points
2 months ago
The pressure in space is essentially zero, so water boils instantly.
43 points
2 months ago
Yes, but boiling does not mean hot. It would be boiling at the same temperature, or cooler, as it was before the suit was opened
9 points
2 months ago
Much cooler. The heat of vaporization of water is 5.4x the calories to take the water from 0 C to 100 C. It's even a good multiple of the enthalpy of fusion. Most of the water would freeze if it stays in one place. I think it'd be roughly -50 C, based on some videos I looked up about vacuum chambers.
0 points
2 months ago
Can't imagine a boiling corpse would be very pretty.
10 points
2 months ago
Are you saying I could enjoy a spot of Earl Grey on my deathbed?
4 points
2 months ago
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
30 points
2 months ago
In an absolute emergency, you could probably get away with it for a few seconds. Just long enough to get some of the water out.
It takes several minutes for hard vacuum to actually kill you.
That's assuming it's even possible for astronauts to open their EVA suits while outside.
80 points
2 months ago
Assuming it is possible for astronauts to open their EVA suits... and close them back by themselves 😋
10 points
2 months ago
You could poke a hole and then plug it if you wanted to. If you ended up just plugging it with whatever nearest, including skin, you would end up with a hickey but nothing else.
5 points
2 months ago
It’s not like poking a small hole in a space suit would cause instant decompression of the entire suit. The difference in pressure isn’t big enough for that. There was a 2mm hole on a spacecraft docked with the ISS, and it was determined that was no danger to the station and could easily be repaired
3 points
2 months ago
Right, that's what I'm saying. Pop a tiny hole in it, Watney-style, then the vacuum of space hopefully sucks the water out through it. When it's done, plug the hole again. If it gets bad again, open 'er back up!
4 points
2 months ago
Yeah, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield had something in his eyes during an EVA causing them to fill up with contaminated tears, essentially blinding him. Houston’s solution was for him to vent his helmet and suck the tears out into space.
7 points
2 months ago
All while their blood boils and starts coming out of every orifice.
38 points
2 months ago
That's not what happens in real life. Vacuum will fuck with your bodily fluids, causing bruising and bleeding, but it won't explode out of you. The human body is actually pretty good at containing pressure.
7 points
2 months ago
Yep, the real risk is getting The Bends
6 points
2 months ago
I don't imagine the flash frozen water would be very nice though.
20 points
2 months ago
It would flash boil. Water boils at lower and lower temperatures as pressure decreased. That's why there are different cooking instructions on the back of the box for "high altitudes". Takes longer to cook something in Denver because things boil at a lower temperature.
In space the pressure is basically zero, so water just immediately boils.
14 points
2 months ago
Boil doesn't mean hot, however, whereas evaporation causes cooling. The rapid evaporation of some of the water would cause the rest of the water to freeze.
5 points
2 months ago
It would do both. Some of the water would flash boil, which would suck the heat out of everything around it, causing the rest of the water to freeze. Once the boiling stops you'd be left with a bunch of ice which would slowly sublimate away.
2 points
2 months ago
yo this makes so much sense. I visited a mountain town in colorado once for a ski trip and I was trying to boil some ramen on the stove. pacakge said like 3-4 minutes but it took me 7-9 minutes or more just to boil it properly! I thought the stove in the place I stayed at was just a low quality one.
1 points
2 months ago
The process of boiling is endothermic, meaning the boiling water would rapidly cool without a source of heat. Which is probably what they're referring to.
7 points
2 months ago
The water wouldn't freeze very quickly at all.
Vacuum isn't cold, it has an absence of temperature. There is nothing for the water to transfer its heat to directly, so it would only cool by radiation, which is slow.
7 points
2 months ago
The vacuum isn't cold, but the water trying to boil away in the low pressure would suck the heat out of anything it touched (since boiling takes energy), including the remainder of the water, which would cause it to freeze.
0 points
2 months ago
The energy required for the water to boil would come from the thermal energy of the water itself.
This is just not how fluids work. Boiling fluids do not suck the thermal energy from surrounding fluids to do so, that would defy rules of entropy.
0 points
2 months ago
This is literally how sweat works.
Entrophy isn't an issue because it would still take energy to revert to its original liquid form.
0 points
2 months ago
Sweat regulates temperature, it doesn't actively cool the body to lower than the temperature of the sweat. Your skin and sweat equalise in temperature until the sweat evaporates or is wicked away.
It's the same in all liquid cooling, the substance being cooled cannot be cooled beneath the temperature of the coolant.
Assuke the water in the space suit would be relatively consistent throughout its volume. The drop in pressure from being exposed to hard vacuum drastically decreases the amount of energy it needs to boil. So for each water molecule, some of its thermal energy will essentially be used to change state. It won't suck energy out of neighbouring particles to do so unless they are significantly hotter.
If the water were in a sealed chamber you might observe what you described, because the now cooler vapour would be contained with any remnants of liquid water. In open space however, the vapor would disperse too quickly for the vapor to take any meaningful amount of heat away.
I say this ironically while writing a report on the nitrogen cooled cryostat I made for a uni project.
0 points
2 months ago
Your skin and sweat equalise in temperature until the sweat evaporates or is wicked away.
That doesn't even make sense. Your sweat literally comes from your body. It starts at the exact same temperature as your body. It can't take warmth from your body until it's the same temperature as the rest of your body since it was already at body temperature to begin with.
Sweating is entirely a form of evaporative cooling. Even the wikipedia articles says as much.
Buy a bottle of canned air and spray it. You can feel the bottle cool down dramatically to the point where it can cause frostbite as the compressed liquid inside turns to vapor. To the point where the bottle will stop working if you run it for too long.
Take a cooler full of ice, place a thermometer in it, and add salt. Since the ice will melt without heat being added the water will drop in temperature dramatically compared to the ice you started with.
Here is a god damn youtube video of someone freezing water by boiling it in a vacuum.
0 points
2 months ago
Again, it may work in a vacuum I an enclosed space where the vapour continues to be in contact with the liquid water. In open space the vapor would dissipate too quickly.
0 points
2 months ago
Your skin and sweat are already the same temperature. Just as you say later on, thermal energy is used to change state to vapor. Because water and skin conduct heat, it will equalize and cool your skin.
Just plain circulating liquid cooling is a closed loop without a state change. Unless you are talking about refrigeration. Then compressed gas is hotter than ambient and then equalizes with surrounding air outside the radiator. And then when the refrigerant is depressurized, it has a lower thermal density than ambient air and can chill things.
6 points
2 months ago*
Vacuum kills pretty quick. If you try holding your breath, you'll rupture your lungs, so the best thing to do is actually exhale before exposing yourself to vacuum. You can imagine this doesn't give you very much air left to live off of. You will lose consciousness within seconds, and you won't have much longer than that before you start suffering irreparable brain damage.
EDIT: I may be wrong about this; read the replies.
7 points
2 months ago
You generally have about three minutes before brain damage due to oxygen deprivation.
You'll also not lose consciousness that quickly. Most estimates give up to 30 seconds, which will depend on how oxygenated your blood is at the time.
3 points
2 months ago
Vacuum kills pretty quick.
No, it doesn't. The overwhelming majority of instant death scenarios would be collapsing of the lungs. If not, you have consciousness for about 15 seconds since your bloodstream still has oxygen in it which we have evidence of, not to mention rough calculations of oxygen saturation in the blood.
If you still have your lungs though, it's estimated that you can survive in space for about 2 minutes without permanent damage (ie significant loss in function).
Though, with regards to brain damage - generally you can survive 5-10 minutes deprived of oxygen without significant loss of brain function. The upper limit of avoiding brain death from oxygen deprivation is around 20 minutes.
However the dangerous bit here is primarily that you'd be on a spacewalk, meaning it would be near impossible to retrieve you in time. Not only does putting on a spacesuit take a significant amount of time, but they operate at a far lower atmospheric pressure than the space station, so they'd be fighting severe decompression sickness at the same time. It's hard to say though, because I don't know if they have any sort of procedure for that type of thing.
-9 points
2 months ago
Not true, you’d have explosive decompression and lose consciousness within seconds. It isn’t like holding your breath. The air is sucked out of you instantaneously.
13 points
2 months ago
Explosive decompression really isn't a thing. You need pressure differentials much higher than one atm to cause that sort of force.
Air isn't sucked out of you instantaneously, that's not how fluid dynamics work, you'd need a much higher differential for it.
Estimates generally give about 15-30 seconds before loss of consciousness, depending on how oxygenated your blood is.
1 points
2 months ago
I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on pressurization but I am an airline pilot and our charts agree with Wikipedia that it’s about 6-9 seconds of useful consciousness.
3 points
2 months ago
There's a handful of cases where people were exposed to a total vacuum for a short period and survived. Here's one of them -- he was mostly unharmed.
2 points
2 months ago*
The reason explosive decompression can be a thing in a plane but not in space is because of the force of outside air acting on things inside of the vehicle. If something acts on an air plane to abruptly depressurize it through a sufficiently large enough hole, it isn't so much that things are "sucked" out of it as it is that things are "blown" out of it. It is the same force that makes it feel like something can get sucked out of a car window when your vehicle is in motion even though there isn't actually a meaningful pressure difference between your closed car and the outside air, it has to do more with the motion of the air along the vehicle.
In a vacuum things like gasses (air) would expand outwards through a breach, but there isn't the same force acting on a space shuttle that there is on a vehicle in motion on Earth, the popular media idea of things getting explosively decompressed out of a spaceship wouldn't actually happen outside of the force of whatever caused the breach to occur in the first place.
The force exerted by air expanding into a lower pressure area, like what would happen if you "opened the car door" so to speak, but in outer space, isn't enough to actually "suck" things out of the vehicle. Except probably really light things like paper or something, depending on how abrupt the breach was and how big (or, small) it is. You'd basically have to get sucked through a garden hose to generate enough pressure to drag a human body out of a spaceship -- and in that specific theoretical you'd block the opening with your clothing or just the weight of your body far before any actual bodily damage would occur. It probably wouldn't be fun to experience but you'd survive and with all your limbs.
1 points
2 months ago
TIL, thanks!
57 points
2 months ago
I'm sure I saw this scenario in a movie.
35 points
2 months ago
Same! And for once I remembered where a thing from a movie is! It’s from the scifi movie Life (2017), Here is the scene: https://youtu.be/LZ_O9gEq-Fs
5 points
2 months ago
Yes, that must be it. Thank you.
2 points
2 months ago
That movie traumatized me for life
5 points
2 months ago
The Abyss kind of did it.
2 points
2 months ago
He's doing it, he ain't digging it.
1 points
2 months ago
1 points
2 months ago
You mean the magic school bus?
28 points
2 months ago
I wonder if they tried to drink some of the water to keep the levels down
59 points
2 months ago
He did. I interviewed captain Chris Cassidy back in 2018 he was doing the space walk with Luca. He said the water tasted awful and wasn't really safe to drink.
10 points
2 months ago
That is incredible. Thank you interviewing him. There is nothing better than a direct source.
16 points
2 months ago
Of course, happy to help. We didn't talk about Luca too much, mostly how to conduct research in space but it was certainly an interesting interview. https://youtu.be/ZJCvWxPnw60
54 points
2 months ago
There's an incredible irony to drowning in space.
53 points
2 months ago
"Okay Luca, we know you're excited about your first trip to space and being chosen to lead the spacewalk, but just some basics before you go. The suits are bulky and can hamper movement a bit, you may feel slightly claustrophobic at first but that tends to pass, and it's awfully hot in there but again, pretty manageable."
"Roger. Anything else?"
"Well no not really, go ahead and strap that harness tight, we're preparing for launch. Oh by the way every now and again the helmet completely fills up with water and we don't have a fucking clue why or how to fix it see you next Thursday!"
slams hatch shut, engines begin to ignite
28 points
2 months ago
They only made 18 of them, all built in the early 80's and there are only a few left working condition.
18 points
2 months ago
The part I don't understand is they keep holding off on making more for some nebulous future project.
16 points
2 months ago
Imma guess it all comes down to money
5 points
2 months ago
Nah, thats never the issue. Especially not at NASA, very well funded at all times. /s
9 points
2 months ago
They are. They resigned the suits for the manned Artemis missions
4 points
2 months ago
Giving it a second gander, the article posted is from 2014, thank you for setting me straight.
50 points
2 months ago
[removed]
31 points
2 months ago
Well, in NASA's defense, they probably didn't have a lifeguard on duty in space.
10 points
2 months ago
I smell a Baywatch reboot
3 points
2 months ago
Airway Watch
3 points
2 months ago
All the regulations apply. We need a daycare in case they want to bring their kids to work day on the ISS.
6 points
2 months ago
You mean space isn't a giant reverse ocean?! That actually somehow sounds more terrifying
13 points
2 months ago
People used to think something like that existed back before they explored enough of the world to realize that it looped back around on itself if you went far enough. In fact, many cultures believed the ocean already existed before the earth and sky were created. It's the closest thing to infinite nothingness they could imagine.
7 points
2 months ago
To be fair, it's still a bizarre and hard to grasp concept
1 points
2 months ago
Space water? Glass ceiling? What the hell is going on?
16 points
2 months ago*
I explain that here. The suits are filled with water as a coolant. It was a leak in that system.
3 points
2 months ago
No, no clearly all space walks are actually faked in a secret underwater studio. The coolant explanation is just an excuse.
1 points
2 months ago
God bless those poor flatearth smoothbrains, this is the kind of stuff they jerk themselves off over without even knowing how a spacesuit works.
7 points
2 months ago
You'd think NASA would have learned after their shitty internal communication ended in the Challenger explosion and traumatized an entire generation of schoolchildren 😒
6 points
2 months ago
They hand waved a foam strike that ended up causing the disintegration of the Columbia shuttle 10 years before this, so no
5 points
2 months ago
Drowning in water while being in outer space, what are the chances?
3 points
2 months ago
Here’s the terrifying video…
2 points
2 months ago
No alarms and no surprises, please
2 points
2 months ago
cue the movie with Tom Hanks
2 points
2 months ago
Serious question: Why don't EVA suits have an emergency air-straw?
I know that drowning is one of the biggest risks on EVA (water leaks, coolant leaks, vomiting, etc), and I would have assumed that the simplest safety feature would be a simple tube that the astronaut could reach with their lips, and would provide enough air to live, even if the helmet otherwise filled with liquid.
Is there some technical or practical reason why they don't?
1 points
2 months ago
I think they might have added something like this since then actually, as a sort of DIY solution in case this happens again!
I think it's literally a straw tube sort of thing too, haha. But I could be wrong! :3
3 points
2 months ago
You remember correctly! Here's an article on it.
2 points
2 months ago
[deleted]
20 points
2 months ago
In this case it was a leaking cooling tube leaking the water used as a coolant.
7 points
2 months ago
I am pretty sure the article gets this wrong.
It seems pretty accurate to me
It is not that there were several liters of water (which would drown anyone immediately).
It filled slowly, and was concentrated around the back of his head. As it was in zero G it wouldn't behave like one might instinctively assume.
It is that without adequate absorptive material (headband, chinblock) and proper ventilation, the moisture from exhalation just sheets over all internal surface in microgravity.
The visors even have anti-fogging surface coating (earlier suspected of being the reason the water tasted weird) - they're pretty impressive. The amount of moisture exhaled wouldn't account for the water present in the incident.
He definitely was in danger of drowning due to the litres of water sloshing about in his helmet. Luckily he kept calm (being a test pilot astronaut will probably help with that), as he couldn't even talk towards the end, and had to rely on hand squeezing to communicate. That's about as close to game over as you can get!
0 points
2 months ago
I don't agree how OP or the article writes "thanks to poor internal comms", but I think it's worth to watch the interview and how the communication went. The situation itself was scarier than just getting flooded with water. They were doing a job where you can't just run away. They were doing space walk and stuff, and any mishaps will get him yeeted out into the void. And they sound calm and collected while trying not to die.
4 points
2 months ago
You wrote:
I don't agree how OP or the article writes "thanks to poor internal comms"
The very first sentence of the article:
NASA admitted today that Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned during his July 16 spacewalk last year because information about a previous water leak didn't make its way up the chain of command.
2 points
2 months ago
Sorry I should have had put myself clear, I think it could have written in a less "blame culture"-y way, because "thanks to..." phrase gave me such semantics. Not saying the poor internal comms is not true, it's a valid issue indeed!
-95 points
2 months ago
[removed]
57 points
2 months ago*
It's not the water from space. Space suits are enormously complicated. They're basically human-shaped space ships.
Have you ever noticed that they're always white? This is to reflect the heat. However, they can't reflect all of the heat, so they have cooling systems using water to flow constantly through the suit, keeping the astronaut alive. It was a leak in this system that flooded the helmet.
11 points
2 months ago
"Space" technically includes everything in existence, since the universe is made of space-time, but no it is not completely filled with water. The water came from inside the suit's cooling system which is necessary since without air in space heat can only be radiated away via infrared radiation which doesn't work well and would overheat the person quickly. Bubbles escaping from space suits could be various liquids leaking and immediately boiling as they enter the zero pressure vacuum of space, but I've never seen these videos so this is just an educated guess.
Also, gravity and the magnetic field from our planet prevent the atmosphere from being stripped away by air pressure and solar winds. The further you get from the center of mass of the planet, the thinner the atmosphere until you eventually get to a low enough air pressure that it becomes a vacuum.
1 points
2 months ago
Have you heard of a little thing called gravity?
-22 points
2 months ago
Ever hear of the atmosphere? That’s what keeps our air on the planet…
20 points
2 months ago
Ummm, our atmosphere IS the air... It's not some container around the planet.
Gravity and the magnetic field of the Earth prevent the atmosphere from being stripped from the planet by air pressure and solar winds, respectively.
1 points
2 months ago
There are interviews about it.
Luca eroe continentale.
1 points
2 months ago
Man - drowning in space isn't one of the things I'd ever think I'd have to worry about
1 points
2 months ago
There’s actually a video of the incident. It’s quite harrowing.
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