Alexei Leonov

Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk in March 1965 and nearly did not get back inside. He left Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes on a tether, and his suit inflated in the vacuum until he could not bend his fingers or fit through the airlock; he vented air from the suit to reduce the pressure, against the rules and at real risk of decompression sickness, and forced his way back in head first. The flight then failed its automatic re-entry, and he and Pavel Belyayev landed by manual control in deep snow in the Urals, some twelve hundred miles off target, where they spent two nights with wolves around the capsule before skiers reached them. None of this was reported at the time. He was chosen to command the first Soviet lunar landing attempt, and the programme was cancelled after the repeated failures of the N1 rocket, which he spoke about openly only decades later. He commanded the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975, the first joint flight of the two space programmes, and the handshake in orbit with Thomas Stafford was the visible symbol of detente; the two remained close friends for the rest of Leonov's life and Stafford spoke at his funeral. He was also a competent painter who took coloured pencils into orbit and produced the first artwork made in space, and he illustrated science fiction with the artist Andrei Sokolov. Arthur C. Clarke named the spacecraft in 2010 after him. He ran cosmonaut training for many years and later worked in banking. A crater on the far side of the Moon carries his name.

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