Chris Hadfield: 'I'm blind, in space, holding a drill. Houston, I have a problem'

An extract from Chris Hadfield's An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth

I am calm the night before my first spacewalk in 2001, but I am also conscious I am about to do something I've been dreaming of most of my life. I feel ready – I've studied and trained for years. Still, I spend hours polishing the visor of my spacesuit so my breath won't fog it up, unpacking and checking each piece of gear, pre-assembling as much of it as I can, then carefully attaching it to the wall with Velcro. My crewmate Scott Parazynski and I are installing Canadarm2, the robotic arm that will build the International Space Station, currently still in its infancy. We docked our space shuttle, Endeavour, to it a few days before, but haven't yet been able to open the hatch because our EVA (extravehicular activity, or spacewalk) is going to take place from the shuttle airlock – essentially a depressurised bridge between the two spacecraft.


There are multiple steps to follow for an EVA; mess one up and you won't make it out of the spaceship. It will be many busy hours until we can float out of the airlock and Nasa has choreographed them down to five-minute slices, even dictating when and what to eat for breakfast: PowerBars and rehydrated grapefruit juice. I shave, wash up (hair-washing involves scrubbing your scalp vigorously with no-rinse shampoo, then drying off carefully to be sure stray wet hairs don't wind up floating all over the spacecraft and clogging up air filters or eyes and noses) and use the toilet. (You pick up a thing that looks like a DustBuster with a little yellow funnel attached, then hold it up close so you don't get pee everywhere. I don't want to have to use my diaper if I can help it.) Then I pull on the liquid cooling garment, which is like long underwear with a lot of personality; it's full of clear plastic tubing that water flows through, and we can control the temperature. It feels stiff, like a cheap Halloween costume, but when the sun is shining on you in a spacewalk, the fabric of the spacesuit gets extremely hot and personal air-conditioning seems like a fine idea.

Four hours later, Scott and I are finally floating head to toe in our spacesuits, carefully and slowly depressurising the airlock and checking and rechecking the LED displays on our suits to make sure that they are functioning properly and can keep us alive in the vacuum of space. If there is a leak in the suit out there, our lungs will rupture, our eardrums burst, our saliva, sweat and tears boil, and we'll get the bends. The only good news is that within 10 to 15 seconds we'll lose consciousness. Lack of oxygen to the brain is what will finish us off.

When the airlock has finally depressurised, I grab the handle on the hatch and turn it – not easily, because nothing in a spacesuit is easy. The hatch is like a manhole, and it has to be removed and stowed in a bike rack-like contraption overhead. My exit will not be graceful. But my number one concern is to avoid floating off into space, so I'm tethered to Scott and I'm holding another tether to attach to the rail on the side of the shuttle. I lower the gold shield on my visor to protect my eyes from the sun and carefully, gingerly, wriggle my bulky suited self out of the airlock. I'm still inside the belly of the beast, in the payload bay, but my suit has become my own personal spaceship, keeping me alive.

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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/26/chris-hadfield-astronaut-book-extract