and the youngest to undertake a long-duration mission. Parmitano also survived a potentially deadly space walk on 16 July 2013, in which a leak flooded his spacesuit helmet with about 1.5 litres of water and nearly drowned him. According to NASA, Parmitano’s cool head helped keep him safe as he made his way back to the airlock. The space walk was intended to last 6.5 hours, but mission controllers aborted the space excursion about one hour into it. A native of Paternò, Italy, Parmitano served as a major in the Italian Air Force—logging more than 2 000 hours flying time and flying over 40 types of aircraft—before the ESA selected him for astronaut training in May 2009. In February 2011, Parmitano was assigned as a flight engineer to the Italian Space Agency’s first long-duration mission on the International Space Station. He was launched on a Soyuz spacecraft launched from Baikonur on 28 May 2013, spent 166 days in space, conducted over 20 experiments, and made two space walks before returning Earth.