Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Dubanx t1_jdqm4ox wrote

Reply to comment by VoxEcho 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

>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.

0

VoxEcho t1_jdr2tj6 wrote

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.

2