If spatulas could talk, there’s one in space that’s screaming.

NASA astronaut Piers Sellers lost one of his many space-hardened spatulas – it has a metal handle – Wednesday during a spacewalk to test a way to fix small cracks in shuttle wing leading edges and nose caps with a black goop called NOAX.

“Guys, I think my spatula’s escaped,” says Sellers during his spacewalk.

A fitting sacrifice, no doubt – one small spatula for the good of human spaceflight – but I have to wonder what it’s like to be the spatula.

One moment your floating in space with four spatula buddies – five NOAX spatulas, talk about redundancy – and the next you’re floating free more than 200 miles above the planet Earth.

Traumatic for sure, but no less eerie than that Russian Orlan spacesuit tossed overboard – on purpose – earlier this year by the International Space Station (ISS) crew.  And let’s not forget the errant foot restraint adapter lost during the last dedicated ISS spacewalk, which prompted current Expedition 13 commander Pavel Vinogradov’s declarative comment: “That’s bad.”

Wednesday’s spatula loss – judging by Seller’s comments – is regrettable, even if it won’t pose a debris risk to Discovery or the ISS.

“That was my favourite spatch,” he says. “Don’t tell the other spatulas.”

Don’t worry Piers, I won’t.

According to the folks here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, astronauts rarely lose stuff on spacewalks. At the ISS, though, they do toss stuff overboard pretty often.

In the last few years, they’ve tossed old and busted sensors and small satellites into orbit and all sorts of other stuff into safe orbits that eventually decay into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Still though, poor spatula.