- 4 days ago
Space suits allowed Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon and will allow explorers to walk on Mars; the evolution of the technology, from the first crude suit that nearly killed early cosmonauts to the "personal habitats" of the Space Station.
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00:01Space, the most extreme environment humans have ever explored.
00:06You're in this totally hostile environment,
00:09and if the glove pops off, you're dead.
00:12There's only a few thin layers of fabric to keep you alive.
00:16I can feel the intense heat increase along the back of my spine.
00:21I knew I was getting in trouble.
00:23There's no air, high doses of radiation,
00:27and severe swings of temperature.
00:30To explore this frontier, we've engineered the ultimate survival suit.
00:34To build an elbow that flexes, a shoulder joint that rotates.
00:38When you put that pressure in the suit,
00:40that's where it becomes a real challenge.
00:42From the early pioneers, it's a tale of heroic courage.
00:47When I realized I had problems with my suit,
00:50then I knew that no one would be able to help me.
00:56He was the first. That's very brave.
00:59And for those lucky enough to walk in space today,
01:03it's an unforgettable experience.
01:06When you open the airlock,
01:07it feels like electricity floating through your veins.
01:10Now you can fly without wings, without weight.
01:13You're floating. It's almost magic.
01:16This is the story of the spacesuit.
01:19Told by the designers, the engineers, and those who wear them
01:24on the highest frontier of human exploration.
01:28Welcome to space. Have a good one.
01:37250 miles above the Earth, Luca Parmitano is realizing an astronaut's dream.
01:44When you go outside, all you have is your spacesuit.
01:47And out there, there is a whole universe.
01:52And you are strongly aware of that.
01:56Is it exciting? Yes, incredibly exciting.
02:01With fellow astronaut Chris Cassidy,
02:04he's walking in space to maintain the space station.
02:08When he notices that something's wrong.
02:11I reached back with my head and I felt water in my helmet.
02:16It could have been sweat, but it felt like a lot.
02:19It didn't make any sense.
02:21And that's when I called the ground.
02:23I feel a lot of water on the back of my head.
02:26My head is really wet.
02:28And Chris started seeing the water accumulating on my forehead.
02:34Oh, I see. I see it now.
02:39This situation is extremely dangerous.
02:42In space, the water will stick to his head
02:46and could spread across his face.
02:48I could feel it traveling from the back of my head
02:50towards the front of my head.
02:52Hey, Luca, can you clarify?
02:53Is it increasing or not increasing?
02:59It's increasing.
03:05Hi, Chris. This is Luca.
03:07We think we're going to terminate EVA case for EV2.
03:10So, Luca, we'll have you head back to the airlock.
03:13Can you copy that, Luca?
03:15Head on in.
03:18NASA quickly aborts the spacewalk.
03:20But Luca's condition is changing faster than anyone expects.
03:24The water covered my eyes, and it went inside my nose.
03:28It also went inside my ears.
03:30Now I couldn't see.
03:31I couldn't hear.
03:32I had to breathe only through my mouth, and I couldn't talk.
03:36Trapped inside his space suit, Luca can't wipe the water away.
03:41The suit that should protect him is now threatening to suffocate him.
03:46No one knows how long he's gone before the water covers his mouth.
03:55The origins of the space suit begin almost by accident 80 years earlier.
04:00It's 1934.
04:03Aviation pioneer Wiley Post is preparing a record-breaking transcontinental flight across America.
04:11Wiley Post was just an adventurer.
04:14His career got started as a roughneck in the oil fields of Texas.
04:17Second day on the job, he was blinded in one eye by an accident.
04:21He took the money he got in compensation, bought an airplane, and just jumped in with aviation with both feet.
04:27With two round-the-world flight records to his name, Post is no stranger to danger.
04:34But this new challenge will expose him to different risks.
04:38To fly faster, Post will need to use high-speed winds found at up to 50,000 feet, where the
04:46air is too thin to survive.
04:48Up here, without enough atmospheric pressure, nitrogen in his blood will form bubbles, causing the bends.
04:56Then there's the lack of oxygen.
04:58The first thing you notice is cognitive issues.
05:03You don't know where you're born, you don't remember your name, and if that persists, you'll die.
05:13One possible solution is to carry more air, sealing the cockpit to maintain the right pressure.
05:20But that will be too expensive for Post, and will add too much weight to get the plane to the
05:25right altitude.
05:27So the solution for him, very logically, is if you can't pressurize the airplane, pressurize the pilot.
05:33Post decides to protect himself inside a suit that will hold the air pressure and the oxygen he needs to
05:39survive.
05:40He approaches a company that specializes in rubber, called B.F. Goodrich.
05:46They task engineer Russell Coley with the job.
05:50Russell Coley is a fascinating character in the history of spacesuit development.
05:55He had originally wanted to go to fashion school and become a designer for women's dress wears,
06:00and somehow his parents convinced him to go to technical school.
06:06Coley has a tough challenge.
06:08The suit has to do two different jobs.
06:11Contain air at a higher pressure than its surroundings, and stay flexible.
06:16The requirement for flexibility and the pressure are contradictory.
06:21The tricky part in a pressure suit is being able to move, because you've got to fly the controls.
06:26And if you can't do that, you can't fly the airplane.
06:29To keep the suit flexible, the pressure inside it will be just one-third of that found at sea level.
06:35But no one knows if the suit will keep him alive.
06:40Coley stitches it on his wife's sewing machine.
06:44Post's life will depend on the quality of his needlework.
06:52Dressed inside it, Post boards his Lockheed Vega aircraft in Los Angeles on March 15, 1935.
07:03As he approaches 50,000 feet, he's well into the death zone, but Coley's stitching is holding.
07:12When he got the airplane up to altitude and found the jet stream, his average speed was 289 miles an
07:18hour.
07:19Quite remarkable, because it was significantly faster than the airplane was designed to go.
07:25Post covers the first 2,000 miles in just over seven hours, and is on track to beat the transcontinental
07:33record.
07:37But 400 miles short of the New York finish line, he starts to run low on oxygen, and is forced
07:44to land in Cleveland.
07:47Post might not have clinched his speed record, but he's proved that man can survive at 50,000 feet, thanks
07:53to Coley's pressure suit.
07:56His flight was indeed a very big deal, because it showed the importance of pressurization.
08:02Developing world's first practical working pressure suit is enormously important.
08:12Today, Post's suit is kept at the Smithsonian's Conservation Institute in Washington, D.C.
08:20Post's pressure suit is made of three layers.
08:24You can see the first one here was the inner layer.
08:26This is a Union suit, or long johns.
08:29It was for warmth, so it would have been very nice and comfortable.
08:32Second layer, and this is the crux of the outfit, is this rubber inflatable bladder that went over his entire
08:41body up to his head.
08:43But it wouldn't work unless you had this heavy-duty outer layer, which is made of very heavy-duty cotton
08:50that's stitched and re-stitched
08:51to contain the rubber bladder as it expands.
08:55Key to the success of the suit was the helmet.
08:58It looks a bit like a diving helmet.
09:00Good fit, rubber seal around the edge.
09:02Given that he only had one eye, they actually positioned the window a little bit off-center, so it maximized
09:09the visibility for his good eye.
09:10It is the grandfather of all pressure suits.
09:15Today's spacesuits still balance the same contradictory requirements of flexibility and pressure in the even more challenging vacuum of space.
09:24During the 1940s and 50s, Russell Coley lays the groundwork for many of today's spacesuits as he works on a
09:33new generation of pressure suits to fly even higher than post.
09:40Surprisingly, his breakthrough solution comes to him while tending his garden.
09:48He was watching a tomato worm walking in segments and expanding and contracting, and he saw how the worm would
09:56expand on one side while contracting on the other and using that as locomotion.
10:02Copying the tomato worm, Coley designed something called a convolute.
10:07It's a joint that behaves like an accordion, and it transforms pressure suits like this Arrowhead Mark IV.
10:15The convolutes are spaced at the knees, the tops of the thigh, the waist, the elbows and forearms.
10:24Here you have a pressure suit that would allow a pilot to move his legs, bend his knees, bend over,
10:31reach from side to side.
10:33It's another advance, and by the late 1950s, segmented suits have been adopted by U.S. Navy and Air Force
10:40pilots,
10:41who are flying regularly up to 100,000 feet, twice as high as Wiley Post.
10:48But this type of suit isn't a match for the next challenge.
11:06America is about to enter the space race against the Soviet Union.
11:11And that brings a whole new set of problems to solve, to keep a man alive where no pilot has
11:18gone before.
11:20NASA's first astronauts, the Mercury 7, will soar to almost a million feet above sea level, over ten times higher
11:28than any plane has been flown.
11:31To keep them alive, their capsules will be pressurized, but they'll need a backup in case that fails.
11:40This is a Mercury suit. It's very similar to the Mark IV suit. The shoulders are flexible, the elbows are
11:47flexible, but it's not so much necessary to have the knees flexible because the astronauts are just going to be
11:52sitting for the entire duration.
11:55These suits were not made for work outside of the spacecraft, but they wanted the safety of having a space
12:01suit. So if anything happened to the spacecraft, the astronaut could survive long enough to get back down to Earth.
12:09Once again, all eyes turn to Russell Coley as the man most trusted to build NASA a suit for space.
12:17But this is uncharted territory, and it will be Coley's biggest challenge.
12:23In the vacuum of space, a pressurized suit is going to want to expand into the airless void, and it
12:31could burst. Coley's convoluted joints are going to need a rethink.
12:36Coley thought that by using just a simple restraint system on either side of a joint, that would hold it
12:44in, and he experimented in inserting fabric inside the rubber joints to make sure it held its shape.
12:53But before a Mercury astronaut can test Coley's suit on a space flight, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, wearing a Soviet pressure
13:01suit, captures the world's attention as he becomes the first spaceman in space.
13:13In history.
13:15Just three weeks later, Alan Shepard steps out of his suiting room to board his own rocket ship to space.
13:23He's dressed in Coley's iconic silver Mercury space suit.
13:27Section 60 bus, 24 volts, 26 amps.
13:45In outdoor air.
13:48Left off, and the clock is started.
13:53Looking on is test pilot and future Apollo astronaut, Charlie Duke.
13:58I looked at Alan Shepard in that little Mercury suit,
14:01and my initial impression was these guys look like they're in a Buck Rogers suit.
14:08You know, I hope this thing holds together.
14:10What a beautiful view.
14:16Alan Shepard's Mercury flight is a triumph.
14:20As the first American astronaut returns to Earth,
14:24the press dubbed Coley first tailor of the space age.
14:31Coley's futuristic-looking outfits will pave the way for a fully flexible spacesuit
14:36that will achieve the unthinkable, allowing men to walk on another world.
14:49Such a mission will call for astronauts and cosmonauts
14:53to venture outside the safety of their spacecraft.
14:57In March 1965, it's the Soviets who are first yet again,
15:02beating the Americans to a suit that'll keep a man alive in the vacuum of space.
15:08It's known as the Burkitt Golden Eagle.
15:14It's a suit that the Russians really cobbled together very quickly based on Yuri Gagarin's suit.
15:20They added a couple of extra layers of insulation
15:23so he wouldn't be subjected to the solar radiation coming unfiltered directly from the sun.
15:30And they really didn't know what was going to happen.
15:37Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov is hand-picked to put his life on the line.
15:55Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov- When I got out, I stood on the edge of the airlock.
16:09My first impression was, and I even said so, it turns out that the earth is round.
16:16I could see the round earth.
16:19And then I looked down and I could see the whole black sea, Bulgaria, Romania, on the horizon the boot
16:27of Italy.
16:30I could see all the roads, all the canals.
16:38And at the same time, it was incredibly quiet.
16:43This is what I remember most.
16:45I could hear my heartbeat.
16:47Normally, you don't hear your own heartbeat.
16:50And now I could hear.
16:58But after just 10 minutes, Leonov's worst fears are realized.
17:06I suddenly felt my fingers come out of the gloves.
17:12And my feet became loose in the boots.
17:19The soft spacesuit turned rigid under pressure, like an inflated tire.
17:33Expanding uncontrollably into the void, Leonov's suit has become rigid, trapping him inside and preventing him from moving freely.
17:44It was extremely difficult, required a lot of energy and produced a large amount of heat.
17:51And the sweat was stinging my eyes.
17:57Paralyzed inside his bloated spacesuit, and now overheating as well, Leonov fears he can't get back inside the capsule.
18:07I wouldn't be able to enter back in the craft.
18:10I wouldn't be able to close up the hatch.
18:12And I knew that I had only 30 minutes of life left.
18:18Trapped outside his spaceship, time is running out, and Leonov needs to do something fast.
18:26There was a special valve.
18:29A hand valve.
18:32And using this valve, I could lower the pressure by half.
18:38I didn't report anything to the earth.
18:42I just put the pressure down.
18:46The suit deflates, but now there's a new danger, the bends.
18:52I was in a state where nitrogen boils in the blood, and I could feel the decompression prickling the tips
18:59of my fingers.
19:02I was anxiously waiting for my face to swell up and my hands to become like rubber.
19:14I got a little slight prickling, but everything became easier.
19:20So I started going into the airlock.
19:25Even now, I cannot really imagine how I was doing all that.
19:32Leonov's spacewalk almost ends in disaster.
19:35He only just makes it back inside, but he proves that man can survive beyond the earth's atmosphere.
19:46My report to the state commission was very short.
19:50A man equipped with the special clothing of a space suit can live and work in outer space.
19:59That was my report.
20:01It was a very important step.
20:07The Americans have no idea about the problems with Leonov's Golden Eagle suit, but they've created their own suit for
20:15a walk in space.
20:16It's called the Gemini, and it uses a type of chain mail called link net to prevent the rubber garment
20:23from bloating and to maintain the suit's flexibility under pressure.
20:27The Gemini suit was more advanced with the chain link, so the restraints were built into the suit.
20:35It had better insulation, better reflection of radiation, solar radiation that wasn't being filtered out by the Earth's atmosphere.
20:44Astronaut Gene Cernan is chosen for an ambitious mission to test the suit's performance.
20:50The hope was to be able to give you some movement, some dexterity, to be able to do things in
20:58space, because we were still in zero gravity.
21:01We weren't going to be walking, but we needed it up here in the arms.
21:05Cernan's mission is bold.
21:07He must climb to the rear of his spacecraft, where he'll test a rocket-powered backpack called an Astronaut Maneuvering
21:15Unit, or AMU.
21:17It'll be the first time it's been used in space.
21:20These were real rocket engines.
21:22They were spitting out fire, and so my pants were made out of this woven steel thread, which put another
21:30layer on top of it to protect me from burning a hole in my suit, which made it even more
21:36difficult to maneuver in.
21:38Everything you did within that suit was a major effort.
21:45On June 5th, 1966, Cernan floats out of his capsule wearing the new suit.
21:52But his first spacewalk doesn't start well.
21:55The stiffness of the suit isn't giving him the control he needs to climb to the back of the capsule,
22:01and he's beginning to overheat.
22:04I was working pretty hard out there.
22:06My heart rate was running 170, 180.
22:12I knew I was getting in trouble.
22:14I knew people down in mission control getting a little concerned.
22:18And as a result, I overpowered my environmental system in a suit.
22:25Roger, go ahead.
22:42I created so much humidity in the suit that as soon as the sun went down and cooled immediately, boom,
22:51my visor fogged up.
23:05The only way I could see was I could push my nose against the helmet and rub a little hole
23:11in it in the fog to be able to look down and see.
23:15I could see the lights of Australia as I went over, and that's about all I could see.
23:31Cernan's spacewalk is aborted before he's even tested the rocket pack.
23:35He's ordered back inside, but the lack of mobility in his legs still poses a threat.
23:42In Germany, we didn't need the dexterity from the waist down, with one exception, getting back in a spacecraft.
23:50Bending your legs and trying to get in on the instrument panel, and you just couldn't.
23:57Back inside the capsule, but unable to close the door, Cernan's still struggling.
24:02You had to get in and just extend your body and get it as low into the seat as possible,
24:09and then reach up without a lot of room and grab that hatch and get it to the point where
24:16you could close it and then crank it closed.
24:26Cernan's safe.
24:28He's pushed his suit beyond its limits and survived to tell the tale.
24:37I guess I was giving that suit the maximum test in terms of moving around and looking for the kind
24:43of mobility I needed.
24:45It was that bridge. We needed to learn how to do so many new things, including how to build a
24:50suit that we could literally utilize on the surface of the moon.
24:57Winning the race to the moon will require a brand new suit that remains flexible enough to walk in when
25:03pressurized.
25:10Solving this paradox falls to a team of engineers at the International Latex Corporation, or ILC.
25:19It's a tough trade-off. You want to be able to have all that flexibility, but yet not be encumbered
25:24by a pressure suit.
25:26You have to think in terms of what the body can do. There's flex-extension, there's adduction-abduction, there's all
25:33the different motions that a body wants to do.
25:38While ILC's engineers struggle with the suit, there's a completely different problem to solve.
25:44To walk on the moon, astronauts will need to be disconnected from their spacecraft.
25:49The answer is a self-contained life-support backpack.
25:55Tom Sanzone trained the lunar astronauts to use it.
26:00So when the astronaut wore this life-support system, his back was up against it.
26:06We had harnesses that would go over his shoulders and around his waist, so it was literally a backpack.
26:12Of course, we have the umbilicals here. The blue one carried the oxygen in, and the red carried it out.
26:19They would come around the front and plug in.
26:22As the first spacewalks have shown, removing body heat from space suits is also essential for survival.
26:30The solution comes from a British 1950s invention, which kept pilots cool by piping cold water through a network of
26:39fine tubes threaded through their underwear.
26:42The astronaut wore what we call the liquid cooling garment, which was like a pair of long johns with plastic
26:49tubing.
26:49And water would circulate through that. It would pick up the heat from his body.
26:53And then that water would go up to our heat exchanger and pass across plates.
27:01By exposing these plates to the vacuum, the water vents off into space, carrying the astronaut's heat with it.
27:09It's called a sublimator.
27:12I've always loved the sublimator because of its simplicity. It is totally self-regulating. It has no moving parts.
27:20It was a technology that was invented more than 50 years ago, and it's a technology that we still use
27:26today.
27:32With the Apollo life support backpack in hand, the original problem of building a flexible pressure suit remains.
27:40It takes them four years to find a solution.
27:46We came up with this cable system so that you could have the flexibility in it, which meant that if
27:52you do a flex extension,
27:54you can see how this pulley is actually rotating when I go like this because it allows the pulley to
28:00slide through this tunnel right here
28:02and yet keep its shape again when it's pressurized.
28:05This is a knee convolute. It looks fairly simple, but there was a lot involved in dipping this and making
28:11it work.
28:11There was a restraint line, cable on the side that came down. This was revolutionary at the time, and we
28:17put these convolutes throughout the suit.
28:19The astronauts' lives depended on the craftsmanship of those who built their suits.
28:24At ILC, this task fell to a team of dedicated seamstresses.
28:31They knew that your life depended upon what they were doing at that moment in time.
28:38So they took ownership.
28:40They strayed off course by a 32nd of an inch. They totally damaged it, and they'd have to tear it
28:45apart, and it would cost thousands of dollars to fix it.
28:48So there was no room for error.
28:51We went up there a lot to have suit checks and suit fits.
28:55The seamstresses that had to sew the suit together were very important, and we got to know them, and this
29:04nice lady that sewed the zippers in my suit, I wanted her to realize that my life depended on it.
29:10With its convolutes and bearings and pulleys and cables, and life support backpack, this legendary moon suit, the A7L, is
29:21the most sophisticated space suit in history.
29:24Even pumped full of air, it remains flexible enough for a game of football.
29:33It performs brilliantly on Earth, but no one can be certain that it'll work on the moon until the astronauts
29:41get there.
29:50I'm at the foot of the ladder.
29:53It's July 20th, 1969, and America has won the race to land on the moon.
30:01Now everyone's attention is focused on the new A7L space suit, protecting Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong, as he takes
30:09his first tentative step onto another world.
30:13Very fine grains as you get close to it. It's almost like a powder.
30:17Back on Earth, Tom Sanzone's monitoring Armstrong's suit and life support backpack.
30:23We were very focused on what we were doing. Everybody was.
30:26I remember being quite confident that the hardware would work well. It had worked well on the ground.
30:31Some of our more senior managers were a little bit more nervous than the young guys.
30:36I'm going to step off the land now.
30:39That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
30:47As the world savors this historic moment, Tom remains focused on plotting the temperature of the cooling system in Armstrong's
30:56life support backpack.
30:58This is one of the sheets of graph paper that I was plotting.
31:03The yellow bands where we expected the data to fall.
31:07You can see the dots are a little bit lower than the yellow band and that's because the performance was
31:13actually better than we had expected.
31:15Our heat exchanger performed better than it had on the ground.
31:20Neil Armstrong is soon joined on the surface by Buzz Aldrin.
31:24The camera captures their walk in the most extreme place human beings have ever stood.
31:35After the success of this first moonwalk, missions on the lunar surface become longer and more ambitious.
31:42We went from a four-hour system that existed on Apollo 11 to a seven-hour system for those last
31:51three missions.
31:52Free to roam miles from their spacecraft, the astronauts wearing the new moon suits, like Apollo 16's Charlie Duke, can't
32:01wait to try them out.
32:13I stepped on the moon, saw that first footprint, and the thought kept going to me, I'm on the moon,
32:19I'm on the moon.
32:21It's just an overwhelming feeling of this, I'm on the moon. And it was awesome.
32:27We'd like to dedicate the first steps of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible.
32:36Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon on Apollo 17, will spend the longest out on the
32:43lunar surface, more than 22 hours over three days.
32:47The A7L, the suit I walked on the moon with, was as good as it gets.
32:53I mean, that was my own private little spacecraft I had surrounding me to roam about the moon.
33:01Oh my golly! Unbelievable!
33:05I was totally independent. I had my communications, I had my oxygen, I had my cooling, I had it all.
33:12Think about that, that's no wires, no cables, no nothing attaching me.
33:24Inside these extraordinary spacesuits, it's easy for the astronauts to forget that they're standing in a deadly vacuum.
33:32Here I am working on the moon, and I don't think I ever once stopped to think, my gosh, I'm
33:39on the moon and this suit's gotta work.
33:41You just don't think about those kind of things.
33:43Now I had all the confidence in the world, except for one time and one point.
33:49If you fall, and you put a hole in that suit...
33:54If you puncture it, you're dead.
33:58The backpack had the oxygen, the cooling water, all the pumps, all the electrical systems.
34:04Everything to keep you alive was in that backpack.
34:07And if it broke, you're dead.
34:10The Apollo suits prove they can survive the rough and tumble of lunar exploration.
34:15But there's a bigger danger to them on the moon.
34:19Dust, often made of jagged particles, formed by continuous meteorite impacts over billions of years.
34:26Moon dust is very, very fine like powder, and you'd brush and brush and brush, and some of it would
34:32come off,
34:33but not nearly enough, so the suits ended up gray.
34:39Although the astronauts were unaware of it at the time, the damage that the abrasive lunar dust was causing to
34:46their suits is clearly visible today.
34:49Conservator Lisa Young at the Smithsonian Institution looks after them.
34:55This is Charlie Duke's space suit from the Apollo 16 mission.
34:59This is a microscopic view of lunar dust embedded in the outer layer of the suit.
35:04Because it is so abrasive, and it clings to the suit materials, and it embeds itself in those little fibers,
35:10it creates problems.
35:12Over here, you can see a little bit of fuzziness in the image is actually abrasions where the fibers have
35:18separated and broken apart.
35:20Time has taken a toll on the spacesuits, unfortunately.
35:23A lot of the materials used in the space program are reaching their 50-year lifespan, so we're not sure
35:28scientifically what's going to happen after that.
35:30We just try to keep it from degrading further.
35:34When people come to the National Air and Space Museum, they need to be seeing the spacesuit that somebody used
35:39to go to the moon.
35:40Five, four, we've gone from man to star to...
35:43With the race to the moon won, a new challenge beckons on our road to the stars.
35:49The settlement of space.
35:53More people than ever before will now make the ascent to orbit, learning to live beyond their home planet for
36:00months on end.
36:03And this demands a new kind of spacesuit.
36:07The Apollo-era suits had a very short life. They just served for that one mission.
36:12With shuttle, the suits are reusable over and over again.
36:16Space suits are put together for individual people by assembling different combinations of standard-sized components.
36:23Such reusable space suits have now been worn by dozens of different astronauts during more than 150 spacewalks, or EVAs,
36:33to build the International Space Station.
36:36And today, any visitors can use the suits stored permanently on board.
36:41The spacesuits are launched to space station, and they stay up there for several years.
36:45So we've changed from a scenario where the maintenance is all ground-based, done by experienced technicians, to it's done
36:51on orbit by the astronauts.
36:54Spacewalks are a regular and vital part of life in orbit.
36:57But they're never routine, and always risky.
37:02It's July 2013, and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA's Chris Cassidy are making the latest spacewalk from
37:13the station.
37:14Chris and I were going to install equipment on the outside to allow data to be transmitted.
37:23Vicki Margiet is monitoring the spacewalk, or EVA, from the ground.
37:28It was a normal EVA. The crew gets into their suit. They've gone outside the hatch. So we were watching.
37:36And I'd just finished that task when I felt water in my helmet.
37:41It could have been sweat, but it felt like a lot. And it just, it didn't make any sense. And
37:46that's when I called the ground.
37:47I feel a lot of water on the back of my head.
37:52It's news that takes everyone on the ground by surprise.
37:55Nobody really ever anticipated that you could have water backing up into the helmet.
38:03So we really weren't sure what the source of the water was at that point in time.
38:08It's hard to tell, but it feels like a lot of water.
38:11Oh, I see.
38:12Yeah.
38:13In zero gravity, the surface tension of the water binds it together into a sticky mass.
38:21Even if I tried to shake it off, it felt like I was just moving my head inside this bubble
38:25of water.
38:26No one knows it yet, but over two and a half pints of water is flooding into Luca's helmet.
38:34Hey Luca, can you clarify, is it increasing or not increasing?
38:41It's increasing.
38:44I could finish traveling from the back of my head towards the front of my head.
38:48Based on that information, the flight director called to terminate the spacewalk.
38:53Hi, Chris and Luca.
38:54We think we're going to terminate EVA case for EV2.
38:57So Luca, we'll have you head back to the airlock.
39:01Luca should reach the airlock in under five minutes, but he's struggling.
39:07Moving around in a space suit, around the space station, is not an easy task.
39:13You have to maneuver your body and your space suit and reorient it according to where you are.
39:19So, while I was doing one of these maneuvers, the sun went down.
39:26It happens almost instantaneously.
39:29One moment you have light, you have heat, you can see, and the next, all that is gone.
39:35You are left in complete darkness.
39:39That's when the water covered my eyes.
39:41It covered my eyes and it covered my nose.
39:43And it also went inside my ears.
39:45I hear you Luca, go ahead.
39:48Now I couldn't see, I couldn't hear.
39:51I had to breathe only through my mouth and I couldn't talk.
39:55Then I realized that time was really not on my side.
40:00Hey Luca from Houston, how you doing? Give us the status.
40:05Luca, did you hear that?
40:08When Luca did not respond is the first time that we understood the magnitude of the event.
40:14We're all listening to the comm. My knees were shaking. We were concerned.
40:21And then the clock's really ticking fast at that point. It was scary.
40:25I didn't know if the water kept flowing, if it would cover my mouth.
40:30I was thinking, what if my next breath, I'm going to be drinking water.
40:34What am I going to do?
40:40I knew that there was a path that I could take using the handles that I installed outside the space
40:45station.
40:47Even though I couldn't really see because my eyes were covered in water and it was dark,
40:51I knew the general direction I had to take.
40:54Reaching the hatch, Luca finally makes it to the airlock inside and waits for Chris.
41:02Coming in, Luca.
41:06But mission control no longer have contact with him.
41:09And no one knows if he's alright.
41:11Hey Luca from Houston, how you doing? Give us the status.
41:18Luca, did you hear that?
41:24Probably about a minute of Chris trying to communicate with Luca and no response back on the comm.
41:34Inside the space station, the crew are standing by to get Luca out of his suit as fast as possible.
41:48It looks miserable, but okay.
41:52Copy, that's great news. Thanks Chris.
41:54It was very moving, their concern and how fast they moved trying to help me and to dry my face
42:00and to get me out of the suit.
42:04We were very happy to hear and relieved that he was fine.
42:11NASA cancels all future spacewalks until they can figure out what went wrong.
42:19You start going back to these very complex schematics of the life support system, trying to figure out what could
42:24have happened.
42:25Once it was determined that components in the life support system were the source of this problem,
42:32then the history of those components were looked at.
42:34What were the serial numbers? What was the cooling garment? When was it last tested? What was its age? Was
42:40it near its life expectancy?
42:42The investigation reveals a blocked line in the suit's cooling system that diverted water into the helmet's air supply.
42:50A repair is carried out onboard and the suit's maintenance procedures are changed.
42:56I can guarantee you that that failure is not going to happen ever again.
42:59So in a way, we have a lot of lessons learned from IEVA and from what happened today.
43:07The lessons learned from Luca's experience are invaluable for future missions even further away from Earth.
43:16When we start thinking about taking people to Mars, one of the main challenges is the distance we are from
43:22Earth.
43:22And we have to develop a suit system that will be able to repair and maintain very, very far from
43:31home.
43:34The suit will have to be much more reliable. It will have to be maintained by the astronauts to a
43:40greater extent even than today.
43:42The International Space Station provides an ideal platform for testing the next generation of space suits prior to going deeper
43:51into space.
43:54But tomorrow's space suits don't just need to be robust enough for exploration.
43:59This time they must be built for colonization.
44:02We need to provide the astronauts a space suit that will allow them to do construction work, set up facilities
44:09as we do here on Earth.
44:12To reach a mobility close to what we have here on Earth is one of the main challenges of space
44:18suit design.
44:19And we are still working with the ideas of Russell Colley.
44:25Eighty years after Colley's first pressure suit carried Wiley Post to new heights.
44:31His designs are now bringing the dream of living on Mars a step closer.
44:37I really believe that the next place where we'll explore will be Mars.
44:48One day is going to let us continue our exploration beyond low Earth orbit and will allow somebody like me
44:55to put his foot on the red soil of Mars.
45:08Now we are reaching the point of technological maturity where we will be able to set up a more or
45:17less permanent place for humankind on Mars.
45:20That is comparable to 500 years ago when people started going away from Europe and going to places where many
45:31years later we consider it home.
45:34We are reaching that point in history where we are becoming a multi-planetary species and I think that is
45:40just amazing.
45:57You