Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk on March 18, 1965
On this day · 18 March 1965
Leonov's 12-minute float outside Voskhod 2 nearly stranded him outside — and the flight home ended with a night in a forest among wolves.
The first spacewalk was made by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov on 18 March 1965, when he left the Voskhod 2 spacecraft through an airlock and floated free on a tether for about 12 minutes. His commander, Pavel Belyayev, stayed inside.
The walk itself was the easy part. In the vacuum, Leonov’s suit swelled so much that he could not squeeze back into the airlock. He opened a valve and bled off enough air from the suit to wriggle inside, a move the European Space Agency later called hair-raising.
Leonov also took coloured pencils and paper into orbit and made the first eyewitness sketches of Earth from space.
The trip home went wrong too
Getting back to Earth proved nearly as fraught as getting back indoors. The primary retrorocket misfired, and the crew had to fire the backup. The service module failed to separate and burned up on reentry, leaving the capsule destabilised. Voskhod 2 came down in the Urals, far outside the planned recovery area, and Leonov and Belyayev spent a night in the forest, surrounded by wolves, before rescuers reached them the next day.
Before and after
- 18 March 1965: Leonov’s 12-minute outing proves, in ESA’s words, that astronauts could work outside a spacecraft.
- June 3, 1965: the United States answers ten weeks later. Ed White spends roughly 20 minutes outside Gemini IV on a 23-foot tether and calls it the “greatest experience”.
- 1975: Leonov flies once more, commanding the Soyuz half of the Apollo–Soyuz mission, where he and Tom Stafford share the first international handshake in orbit.
- 11 October 2019: Leonov dies aged 85, on a day when two astronauts happen to be spacewalking outside the International Space Station.
Sources & references
3 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 3 independent sources.
