La première sortie spatiale de l'astronaute Chris Hadfield

Racontée par lui même :

Four hours later, Scott and I are finally floating head to toe in our spacesuits, carefully and slowly depressurising the airlock and checking and rechecking the LED displays on our suits to make sure that they are functioning properly and can keep us alive in the vacuum of space. If there is a leak in the suit out there, our lungs will rupture, our eardrums burst, our saliva, sweat and tears boil, and we'll get the bends. The only good news is that within 10 to 15 seconds we'll lose consciousness. Lack of oxygen to the brain is what will finish us off.

When the airlock has finally depressurised, I grab the handle on the hatch and turn it – not easily, because nothing in a spacesuit is easy. The hatch is like a manhole, and it has to be removed and stowed in a bike rack-like contraption overhead. My exit will not be graceful. But my number one concern is to avoid floating off into space, so I'm tethered to Scott and I'm holding another tether to attach to the rail on the side of the shuttle. I lower the gold shield on my visor to protect my eyes from the sun and carefully, gingerly, wriggle my bulky suited self out of the airlock. I'm still inside the belly of the beast, in the payload bay, but my suit has become my own personal spaceship, keeping me alive.

Emerging from the bay, my existence narrows to a single point of focus: attaching my tether to the braided wire strung from one end of the vehicle to the other. I lock on to that and tell everyone I'm securely tethered. Now Scott can come and join me. Waiting for him, I check behind me, to be sure I haven't accidentally activated my backup tank of oxygen, and that's when I notice the universe. The scale is graphically shocking. The colours, too. The incongruity is stupefying: there I was, inside a small box, but now – how is this possible? What's coming out of my mouth is a single word: "Wow." Only elongated: "Wwwooooowww." My mind is racing, trying to understand an experience that is so unique. It's like being engrossed in cleaning a pane of glass, then you look over your shoulder and realise you're hanging off the Empire State Building, Manhattan sprawled vividly beneath. Of course I'd peered through the shuttle windows at the world, but I understood now that I hadn't seen it, not really. Holding on to the side of a spaceship that's moving around the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, I could truly see the astonishing beauty of our planet, the infinite textures and colours. On the other side of me, the black velvet bucket of space, brimming with stars. It's vast and overwhelming, this visual immersion, and I could drink it in for ever, only here's Scott, out of the airlock, floating over towards me. We get to work.

À lire dans le Guardian.