Leonov Steps into Space: First Human Spacewalk

Alexei Leonov squeezed through the airlock hatch of Voskhod 2 on March 18, 1965, pushed himself into the void, and became the first human being to float freely in space. For twelve minutes, connected to the spacecraft by a 5.35-meter tether, he tumbled slowly above the Earth, looking down at a panorama stretching from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea. Then he nearly died trying to get back inside. The mission was the Soviet Union's latest move in the Space Race. NASA was preparing for its Gemini program, which included planned spacewalks, and Soviet leadership wanted to beat the Americans to the milestone. Leonov's spacewalk was rushed into the schedule, with equipment that had been tested but not extensively proven. The Voskhod 2 spacecraft used an inflatable airlock called Volga, an ingenious but fragile fabric tube reinforced by air-filled booms that extended from the spacecraft's hull. Leonov's copilot Pavel Belyayev controlled the airlock from inside while Leonov entered, depressurized, and opened the outer hatch. Two cameras inside the airlock and one on an external boom recorded the historic event. The crisis came when Leonov attempted to reenter the airlock. His spacesuit had ballooned in the vacuum to the point where he could not bend his limbs enough to fit through the hatch. His core body temperature rose dangerously as he struggled. Without informing mission control, Leonov bled air pressure from his suit, reducing it to the minimum survivable level. The suit deflated enough for him to pull himself in headfirst, the opposite of the planned feet-first entry, requiring him to turn around inside the cramped airlock. The problems continued. The spacecraft's automatic reentry system malfunctioned, forcing Belyayev to perform a manual reentry that landed them 386 kilometers off target in a dense Ural forest. The cosmonauts spent two nights in the snow, surrounded by wolves, before rescue teams reached them on skis. Leonov's twelve minutes outside Voskhod 2 proved that humans could work in the vacuum of space, the essential precondition for every subsequent achievement in spaceflight.