Alexei Leonov — The First Spacewalk
Alexei Leonov left his spacecraft on 18 March 1965 and became the first human being to walk in space, and very nearly did not get back in. Voskhod 2 carried two men in a cabin designed for one, with an inflatable fabric airlock bolted to the outside because there was no room for a proper one. The whole mission was arranged to beat the American Gemini programme, whose first spacewalk was ten weeks away. Leonov spent twelve minutes outside on a five-metre tether, tumbling and filming, and reported that the earth was round. The suit then defeated him. In vacuum it had inflated until his hands came out of the gloves and his feet out of the boots, and he could not bend enough to re-enter the airlock feet first as the procedure required. He bled the suit's pressure down to a level at which he risked the bends, went in head first without telling ground control, and had to turn round in a metre-wide tube to close the hatch. He lost about six kilograms in sweat, and his core temperature rose nearly two degrees. The troubles continued. The hatch failed to seal properly, the automatic re-entry system failed, and the crew fired the retrorockets manually and landed 386 kilometres off target in deep snow in the Urals, spending a night in the forest with wolves before skiers reached them. None of it was reported at the time. Leonov commanded the Soviet half of Apollo-Soyuz ten years later. Ed White made the American walk that June, in a suit with the same problem and a shorter exposure to it.
- Year: 1965 CE
- Category: Technology
