A good friend of mine's hobby is to use his Amateur radio to speak to various people around the world and even into space. Yes, he made contact with the International Space station directly from home. This is apparently art as your timing should be impeccable in order to manage this feat.

I have always been interested in Space and after having a conversation with him I started to look into space walks. Just for the fun of it…

Image Credit

Here is some of my learnings:

• The first spacewalk was successfully done on May 11 2013 by two International Space station astronauts to fix a coolant leak.

Five amazing facts about Space walks according to NASA.

• Astronauts travel at around 17 227 Miles per hour on average whilst doing a spacewalk.

• Astronauts is facing from 250 Degree Fahrenheit to - 250 degree Fahrenheit depending on where they are at a specific point in time.

• Depending on the reason for a spacewalk, astronauts can use anything from 70 to 110 tools to perform the required task at hand.

• It takes about 45 Minutes to put on a space suite before the spacewalk and astronauts spend about an hour where they breath clean oxygen before the EVA.

• Susan J Helmes and James s. Voss currently holds the world record for the longest space walks of close to 9 hours on their EVA.
  
  James s. Voss - Image Credit
  
  Susan J Helmes - Image Credit

What will happen if you float into space?

During my searches for information about Spacewalks, I started to think what it will be like to float into space. Luckily NASA has a few safety protocols from preventing this from happening.

• When the astronauts leave the space station, they are attached to the spacecraft at all times with a retractable 26 Metre braided steel tether with a holding strength of 1 100 pounds.

• In the event of the strong tether failing or breaking, the astronauts have access to a SAFE (Simplified aid for Eva Rescue), which is a jetpack, which they can freely use to guide themselves back to the space station.

• In the event that the astronaut is either unconscious or the SAFE fails, they are beholden to the assistance of the other astronauts to save them. There are currently no space vehicle that can assist with the rescue mission.

How far have earthlings died from earth?

This is a terrible thought but while diving deeper into my Google searches, I found a Youtube video titled How Far From Earth Have Earthlings Died?

In this video, the narrator mentioned that 18 astronauts has died during space flight. Tragically 15 of them have died either directly after launch or through re-entry into earth's atmosphere.

There was however an accident where 3 astronauts have died in space at an altitude of around 167 kilometres above earth. Sadly this is the furthest from earth where people have died. The accident happened on June 30 1971. The astronauts that died are Vladislav Volkov, Viktor Patsayev and Giorgi Dobrovolsky. They accident happened after spending 23 days in orbit.

Interestingly enough humanly manned spacecraft's have been preceded by rockets being launched into space. These were occupied by many living creatures including dogs, monkeys, chimps, wasps, beatles, tortoises, flies, worms, fish, spiders, rabbits, bees, ants, frogs, mice, crickets, rats only to mention a few. Wow, that's quite a mouth full :)

Some amazing footage of earth captured during spacewalks.

Video Source

Thanks for reading and I hope you learnt something like me. I really enjoyed digging into spacewalks or the more technical term Extra Vehicle Activity (EVA)

Happy Steeming!

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