On This Day In 1965: Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov Became First Human To Walk In Space; Know The Tragedy He Encountered

Today marks the anniversary of the historic and iconic first spacewalk. On March 18, 1965, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov walked in a spacewalk with its own risks. He achieved the milestone at the age of 30. The Soviet spacecraft Voshkod-2 was launched on this day from its base in Baikonur, modern-day Kazakhstan. On this mission, Leonov was accompanied by Pavel Belyayev.

What happened on this day in 1965?

Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was one of the 20 Soviet Air Forces pilots selected for the first cosmonaut training in 1960. His walk was supposed to have taken place on the Voskhod 1 mission, but got cancelled and he went on to make the history on  Voskhod 2 mission. He exited his spacecraft capsule, tethered by a 16-foot-long cable, and floated in space for 12 minutes and 9 seconds. However, the spacewalk had its consequences.

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When a photographer Marco Grob visited Leonov in 2015 and asked about his experience, he said, "I don’t remember anything as well as I remember the sound – this remarkable silence." Explaining the feeling, he said after he closed his eyes, he saw "the entire Black Sea, the Crimean Peninsula. This is not a map, it’s what I saw. I can take a pencil now and draw it because I remembered it for the rest of my life. I looked up and there was the Baltic Sea, Gulf of Kaliningrad. I spent my adolescence at the Gulf of Kaliningrad. It was so unusual."

How first spacewalk would have-ended in a tragedy for Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov?

When the capsule in which Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov and Pavel Belyayev reached space, the former's mission was to attach a camera to the airlock and document his spacewalk from the still camera strapped to his chest. So when Belyayev opened the outer airlock, Leonov stepped out to perform the same. However, little did he know that it would trigger a life-threatening situation and from the beginning, he started facing problems.

The chest-mounted camera he was supposed to use to document his walk could not be used as his spacesuit inflated making it difficult to access the camera. According to historians Rex Hall and David Shayler, Leonov's body temperature jumped to 35 degrees in just half an hour. Earlier in an interview, Leonov explained his condition inside the spacesuit was like sloshing in sweat, and it happened due to the vacuum of the space. His suit expanded so much that he couldn't reenter the capsule door which was 3.9 feet wide.

So he opened a valve in the suit to release the oxygen, hoping it would depressurize his inflated suit. Well, the trick did help, but Leonov recalled that it was a risky step as releasing the oxygen might not have left him with enough oxygen to breathe. Not only this, it also put him at a risk of decompression sickness.

He was able to enter the spacecraft but their problems didn't end there. The spacecraft capsule went to a spin resulting in the inflatable airlock being ejected in preparation for re-entry. Even the oxygen level inside the spacecraft spiked to a life-threatening level. Leonov and Belyayev tried their best to control the situation inside the craft and were successful.

Leonov retired in 1991 and lived in Moscow until his death on October 11, 2019, after a long illness.

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