And where will that “safety” be? Not a damn clue.

Anyway, one problem at a time. Right now I’m fixing the EVA suit.

AUDIO LOG TRANSCRIPT: SOL 119 (6)

Cutting the arm off the suit was easy; so was cutting along its length to make a rectangle. Those shears are strong as hell.

Cleaning the glass off the faceplate took longer than I’d expected. It’s unlikely it would puncture EVA suit material, but I’m not taking any chances. Besides, I don’t want glass in my face when I’m wearing it.

Then came the tricky part. Once I broke the seal on the patch kit, I had sixty seconds before the resin set. I scooped it off the patch kit with my fingers and quickly spread it around the rim of the faceplate. Then I took what was left and sealed the arm hole.

I pressed the rectangle of suit material onto the helmet with both hands while using my knee to keep pressure on the arm’s seam.

I held on until I’d counted 120 seconds. Just to be sure.

It seemed to work well. The seal looked strong and the resin was rock-hard. I did, however, glue my hand to the helmet.

Stop laughing.

In retrospect, using my fingers to spread the resin wasn’t the best plan. Fortunately, my left hand was still free. After some grunting and a lot of profanities, I was able to reach the toolbox. Once I got a screwdriver, I chiseled myself free (feeling really stupid the whole time). It was a delicate process because I didn’t want to flay the skin off my fingers. I had to get the screwdriver between the helmet and the resin. I freed my hand and didn’t draw blood, so I call that a win. Though I’ll have hardened resin on my fingers for days, just like a kid who played with Krazy Glue.

Using the arm computer, I had the suit overpressurize to 1.2 atmospheres. The faceplate patch bowed outward but otherwise held firm. The arm filled in, threatening to tear the new seam, but stayed in one piece.

Then I watched the readouts to see how airtight things were.

Answer: Not very.

It absolutely pissed the air out. In sixty seconds it leaked so much it pressurized the whole airlock to 1.2 atmospheres.

The suit is designed for eight hours of use. That works out to 250 milliliters of liquid oxygen. Just to be safe, the suit has a full liter of O₂ capacity. But that’s only half the story. The rest of the air is nitrogen. It’s just there to add pressure. When the suit leaks, that’s what it backfills with. The suit has two liters of liquid N₂ storage.

Let’s call the volume of the airlock two cubic meters. The inflated EVA suit probably takes up half of it. So it took five minutes to add 0.2 atmospheres to 1 cubic meter. That’s 285 grams of air (trust me on the math). The air in the tanks is around 1 gram per cubic centimeter, meaning I just lost 285 milliliters.