Hervé Stevenin

EVA and Zero-G instructor for ESA astronauts

Hervé Stevenin leads ESA’s Neutral Buoyancy Facility Operations. With more than 20 years of training experience, he is a spacewalk instructor for European astronauts. Why is underwater training useful for astronauts? Astronauts have to perform EVAs and so we need an environment of weightlessness. Although we can use reduced gravity aircraft, they only give astronauts 23 seconds of pure weightlessness or microgravity. This is not appropriate for EVAs because they are six hours long and astronauts have to work on modules and in a complex environment. So we use an underwater environment to simulate the weightlessness and the astronauts feel like they are in a controlled buoyancy How closely can simulation match real life? The astronauts can work in a big water tank, into which we submerge big modules of…

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