Houston, we have a problem: Astronauts with horror stories in space
Stranded. Stuck in an airlock. Drowning in a spacesuit. The history of humans off-planet has been both beautiful and terrifying. A quick recap.
They left for a week, and they’re still circling.

Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore have been stranded in space for exactly seven months. They brought in the new year on the International Space Station (ISS) and have each celebrated a birthday there. They will return “no earlier than March”, and it is still unclear exactly how or when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) plans to bring them home.
Left stranded after their Boeing Starliner began leaking helium from its thrusters, theirs has become the most protracted of humanity’s space ordeals. But it is, of course, by no means the only one.
Of the 676 people rocketed into space over 62 years (as of November 2023), 30 have died while training for or attempting a space mission.
They include Kalpana Chawla and the six others on aboard Nasa’s Columbia space shuttle, which disintegrated during re-entry in 2003. And the three cosmonauts on the Soyuz 11 who died when their cabin depressurised ahead of re-entry in 1971. There have been parachute failures, control failures, launch-booster failures.
Many more lives have been saved by the quick thinking, extensive training and ability to reinvent under extreme threat that mark every individual selected for a space mission.
From being stuck in an airlock to nearly drowning in their own spacesuits, the history of humans off-planet has been as terrifying as it has been beautiful.
As Low Earth Orbit gets more crowded, a quick recap of horrors that at least ended well.
1961: A landing capsule bursts open
Getting back has always been one of the trickiest parts.
Nasa’s second manned spaceflight, conducted in 1961, ended with an unwanted bang. The hatch of the escape pod, the Liberty Bell 7, blew open prematurely, upon landing, filling the vessel with water and eventually sinking it in the Atlantic Ocean.

In it was astronaut Gus Grissom, in a spacesuit that weighed about 10kg.
After he had somehow scrambled out, he had to swim vigorously to stay afloat, for the five minutes it took a hovering rescue helicopter to reach him.
Theories for why the capsule malfunctioned include one that suggests Grissom accidentally triggered the explosive bolts, and another that cites an explosion caused by static electricity generated, ironically, by the rotors of the rescue helicopter.
In a strange and tragic aside, Grissom would die six years later, aged just 40, during a pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission. He and fellow astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee suffocated when damaged wiring caused the command module’s interior to catch fire.
1965: A spacesuit balloons
This is the kind of thing one would expect to see in a sci-fi film.
On the first-ever spacewalk, during his first-ever trip to space, in 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov’s suit ballooned so dramatically that he couldn’t get back in through the hatch of his craft.
This was eight minutes into what would be a 12-minute excursion.

Leonov eventually decided to lower the pressure within his suit to a dangerous degree, since there seemed no other way to get back into his Voskhod 2 spacecraft.
This proved to be harrowing too, since his fingers could no longer touch the inner tips of his gloves.
In another rather cinematic twist, he knew his life depended on his ability to think clearly and make the decisions he deemed best, so he didn’t inform mission control in Moscow of his plan of action.
All the while, the camera he had attached to the airlock continued to record. Footage of the walk is available on YouTube.
Leonov returned to space once, a decade later, without incident. He died in 2019, aged 85.
2001: Flying near-blind
On his first-ever spacewalk, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s suit malfunctioned, rendering him nearly blind for over half an hour.
It started with a sharp pain in his left eye, as he carried out routine maintenance outside the International Space Station (ISS). Soon, both eyes began to tear up. It later turned out that the anti-fog solution in his suit, a mixture of oil and soap, had leaked onto his face.
With a helmet locked on, he had no way to clear his vision.
Meanwhile, in the absence of gravity, his tears became a ball of moisture that kept colliding with his eyes, blinding him for several seconds at a time. He consulted with Nasa ground control in Houston, which instructed him to open his helmet’s purge valve to let some fresh oxygen in, to evaporate the liquid. This took about half an hour, at which point Hadfield regained his vision and simply got back to work.
2013: Liquid in place of air
Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was out on a spacewalk, performing routine maintenance on ISS, when he felt a wetness inside his helmet, at the back of his neck. Soon, the fitted cap that held his mic and earphones in place was drenched. He tasted a few drops and concluded it wasn’t sweat, and it wasn’t water. It had a metallic tang.
Ground control instructed him to make his way back to the airlock, about 90ft away.

But to get there, he had to swivel around a bank of antennae. This caused more of the liquid to pour into his helmet and a large blob formed, getting into his eyes and mouth.
Parmitano now had no visibility, had to keep his eyes shut, and was having trouble breathing. He had to rely on his knowledge of the space station to guide his movements.
When his colleagues eventually got the suit off him, it turned out that 1.5 litres of fluid, likely from a clogged filter, had poured into his helmet.
After the incident, NASA fitted all its spacesuits with snorkelling devices that can now be used to draw fresh oxygen from within the suit should such a leak recur.
1969: The near-lunar crash
There is still such residual exhilaration around the moon landing that we often forget just how close it was.

As the astronauts came in to land, they realised to their horror that they had drifted 6.4km from the predetermined landing co-ordinates in the Sea of Tranquillity; they had turned the radar on too early, and thereby overloaded the on-board guidance computer, which had a RAM of 4 KB.
With the Apollo 11 now fast running out of the fuel allocated for this stage, mission commander Neil Armstrong took manual control and manoeuvred the craft to the flattest area he could find. It turned out he did it with just 15 seconds left of the fuel earmarked for descent.
.
* The burgeoning private sector has reported one casualty so far. Virgin Galactic’s VSS Enterprise experienced a fatal break-up during a test flight that claimed pilot Michael Alsbury, in 2014. There have been other crashes, but none of them fatal, since most test flights are unmanned.
