OvidPerl

OvidPerl OP t1_jdotqtk wrote

Reply to comment by potatokid07 in 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. by OvidPerl

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.

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OvidPerl OP t1_jdlr8y1 wrote

Reply to comment by _who_is_they_ in 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. by OvidPerl

I explain that here. The suits are filled with water as a coolant. It was a leak in that system.

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OvidPerl OP t1_jdlqfj1 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in 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. by OvidPerl

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.

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