Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano has written a blog post about the experience of having his helmet begin to fill up with water during a space walk. I think it’s fair to say this is a sensation most people will never know – the feeling that you are floating 240 miles above the Earth’s surface, moving at 17,000 miles per hour, and drowning.

It’s definitely not one anyone’s top ten list of things to worry about – or at least it wasn’t. Though I have this vague recollection that I’ve seen a cartoon where an astronaut’s helmet (Bugs Bunny?) fills with water and he watches goldfish swim in front of his eyes. Could that have happened?  Probably.

At any rate, it’s not hard in the year 2013 to find an image of someone with their head inside a goldfish bowl. Thanks, Internet!

In his account, Parmitano describes reluctantly informing mission control that something wasn’t right, suspecting (correctly) the ground controllers would respond by deciding to end the space walk early. He is told to head directly back to the airlock while his partner, Chris Cassidy, attends to some other details before joining him. At this point water is floating inside Parmitano’s helmet.

“… the Sun sets, and my ability to see – already compromised by the water – completely vanishes, making my eyes useless; but worse than that, the water covers my nose – a really awful sensation that I make worse by my vain attempts to move the water by shaking my head. By now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can’t even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid.”

Parmitano has to wait for Cassidy to return to the airlock so pressurization can begin, and then he has to wait a few minutes more for the process to complete before he can remove his helmet. All the while the amount of moisture increases and he is losing communication with those outside his space suit.

“The water is now inside my ears and I’m completely cut off.”

I’m not sure how a person could manage to stay calm in such a situation, though one possible technique would be to sing a song.  Any popular song would do as a distraction, but the disc jockey in me wonders which song would be most appropriate for waiting to see if one will survive an outer-space helmet flood.

Here’s one possibility:

What song calms your nerves?