Astronaut Chris Hadfield "holding on to the outside of a spaceship blind" — Transcript

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1. 0:00I was on my very first spacewalk I was
2. 0:03Canada's first space Walker and I've
3. 0:05been outside for a few hours and
4. 0:06suddenly my left I went blind which is
5. 0:09not what you want to have happen when
6. 0:10you're outside in a spacesuit on a
7. 0:12spacewalk and I just slammed shut in
8. 0:15pain and I couldn't figure out why and I
9. 0:17you can't rub it of course it's inside a
10. 0:19helmet you can't do anything and tears
11. 0:21don't fall without gravity so you end up
12. 0:24with just whatever contamination is in
13. 0:27your eye and I didn't know what it was
14. 0:29you end up with a bigger and bigger
15. 0:31contaminated tier on your eye and you
16. 0:33can't do anything about it it just stays
17. 0:35in your eyes screaming at you in pain
18. 0:36but what do you do so I just worked for
19. 0:38a while just using my right eye but
20. 0:40unfortunately because tears don't fall
21. 0:42the teardrop or to your ball and my face
22. 0:45got big enough that it crossed the
23. 0:47bridge of my nose and went into my right
24. 0:48eye and then both eyes were contaminated
25. 0:50and I was blind in both eyes and then I
26. 0:53had to talk to Houston and they didn't
27. 0:54know for sure what the cause was as I
28. 0:57didn't and we dealt with it we tell our
29. 1:00list is what they suggested that you did
30. 1:01well they thought it might have been the
31. 1:03carbon dioxide removal chemical which is
32. 1:06lithium hydroxide one of its first
33. 1:07symptoms as I irritation and then it can
34. 1:10start doing lung damage so they had me
35. 1:12they said we'd like you to open the
36. 1:14purge valve on the side of your helmet
37. 1:15which made sense but has oxygen is is
38. 1:18basically opening any contamination open
39. 1:21a hole on the side of your suit so that
40. 1:24so that any of the contamination would
41. 1:27have a chance to flush out and fresh
42. 1:28oxygen squirting in from a limited
43. 1:30supply of the tank on your back it's a
44. 1:32very unusual feeling to be holding on to
45. 1:34the outside of a spaceship blind
46. 1:37listening to your oxygen his sewed into
47. 1:39the universe waiting for things to get
48. 1:41better but again it was something it
49. 1:44wasn't it should have been terrifying I
50. 1:46think if it just happened to you out of
51. 1:47the blue but because I knew everything
52. 1:51about the suit that trained on it I'd
53. 1:53spent hundreds of hours underwater
54. 1:54practicing the guy was out with names
55. 1:56Scott Pierzynski he and I practiced
56. 1:58rescuing each other we call it
57. 1:59incapacitated crew rescue we practiced
58. 2:02it we had all sorts of ways to deal with
59. 2:04even a serious a problem as that and
60. 2:06fortunately after about a half hour I
61. 2:08had teared up my eyes enough they'd
62. 2:11evaporated
63. 2:12that it diluted the contamination and I
64. 2:15could see again I could stop purging my
65. 2:16oxygen get back to work and we did about
66. 2:18an eight-hour spacewalk and get
67. 2:19everything done and it turned out all it
68. 2:21was was the anti-fog on the guy on the
69. 2:25visor which used to be sort of a mixture
70. 2:27of oil and and and sort of a soap but
71. 2:31sort of like squirting I don't know oily
72. 2:33soap in your eye just your eyes don't
73. 2:35work so since then we've gone to no more
74. 2:37tears shampoo which we probably should
75. 2:40have done in the first place
76. 2:48you