Near-drowning of astronaut tied to wrong diagnosis, slow response

The near drowning of a space-station astronaut from water that had collected in his helmet during a spacewalk stemmed from acceptance of unusual conditions known to increase risks.

Willingness to accept as routine minor amounts of water in a space-walking astronaut's helmet and a misdiagnosis of a previous water leak helped set the stage for an incident last summer that could have cost an International Space Station crew member his life, according to an analysis of the event.

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In a 122-page report released Wednesday, a mishap investigation board identified a range of causes for the near-tragedy, including organizational causes that carried echoes of accident reports that followed the loss of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia and their crews in 1986 and 2003.

About 44 minutes into a 6.5-hour spacewalk last July, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano noted that water was building up inside his helmet the second consecutive spacewalk during which he reported the problem. Twenty-three minutes later, he and partner Chris Cassidy were ordered to end the spacewalk.

"The good news was that Luca was very close to the air lock when this happened," said Chris Hansen, space-station chiefengineer and head of the board,during a briefing Wednesday that outlined the findings. "When we terminated the EVA, Luca had a pretty close path to the air lock."

Still, as Parmitano worked his way back to the air lock, water covered his eyes, filled his ears, disrupted communications, and eventually began to enter his nose, making it difficult for him to breathe. Later, when crew mates removed his helmet, they found that it contained at least 1.5 quarts of water.

NASA officials immediately set up the five-member mishap investigation board to uncover the broader causes behind the incident, even as a team of engineers at the Johnson Space Center worked to find the precise mechanical cause for the buildup of water.

Engineers traced the leak to a fan-and-pump assembly that is part of a system that extracts moisture from the air inside the suit and returns it to the suit's water-based cooling system. Contaminants clogged holes that would have carried the water to the cooling system after it was extracted from the air. The water backed up and flowed into the suit's air-circulation system, which sent it into Parmitano's helmet. The specific cause of the contamination is still under investigation.

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Near-drowning of astronaut tied to wrong diagnosis, slow response