Alexei Leonov and the First Spacewalk (1965) on Voskhod 2

Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk in history on 18 March 1965, floating outside the Soviet spacecraft Voskhod 2 for about 12 minutes while tethered to the craft. The achievement came close to disaster: his spacesuit ballooned so much that he could barely re-enter, and the flight ended with a manual landing in a snowbound forest in the Ural Mountains. It was one of the most dramatic missions of the Cold War space race.

Background: racing to the next first

After Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961 and Valentina Tereshkova’s in 1963, Soviet leaders wanted further achievements ahead of the American Gemini programme. NASA planned for astronauts to leave their spacecraft during Gemini missions in 1965, so chief designer Sergei Korolev’s bureau hurried to beat them.

The Voskhod spacecraft was a modified version of the single-seat Vostok. Voskhod 1 had carried three men without spacesuits in October 1964. For Voskhod 2 the cabin carried two crew in pressure suits, and engineers added an inflatable airlock called Volga. Because the cabin’s electronics were cooled by air, it could not simply be depressurised, so the cosmonaut would leave through the airlock, which would be jettisoned before landing.

The crew were the commander, Pavel Belyayev, an experienced air force pilot born in 1925, and the co-pilot, Alexei Leonov, born in 1934 in Listvyanka in Siberia. Leonov had been among the first group of cosmonauts selected in 1960 and was also a keen artist.

The first spacewalk

Voskhod 2 was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the morning of 18 March 1965. On the second orbit the airlock was inflated, Leonov climbed into it, and Belyayev depressurised it from inside the cabin. Leonov then pushed himself out into space over the Earth, connected to the ship by a tether about 5.35 metres long that also carried communications. A camera on the airlock filmed him, and Soviet television soon showed the images.

Leonov later described the silence and the sight of the Earth from Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea. He spent about 12 minutes outside, moving away from the hatch and back several times. But in the vacuum his Berkut spacesuit swelled like a balloon. His hands slipped out of his gloves and his feet out of his boots, and the suit became so stiff that he could not reach the switch of his chest camera or bend enough to enter the airlock feet first as planned.

Struggle to return

With the spacecraft soon due to pass into the Earth’s shadow, Leonov took a decision without waiting for permission from the ground. He opened a valve and released oxygen from his suit, lowering its pressure from about 0.4 atmospheres to roughly 0.25 to 0.27 atmospheres, a level that risked decompression sickness. The suit became flexible enough for him to pull himself into the airlock head first, against procedure.

Inside the narrow airlock he then had to curl around to face the hatch so he could close it, an exhausting effort that sent his body temperature up and left him soaked in sweat. After the airlock was repressurised he returned to the cabin. Later he estimated he had come close to heatstroke. The total time from leaving the cabin to returning was a little over 20 minutes.

The problems continued. After the airlock was jettisoned, the cabin’s oxygen pressure rose to unusually high levels, increasing the risk of fire, before the crew managed to bring it under control.

The emergency landing

When the time came to return on 19 March, the automatic orientation system that was supposed to align the craft for re-entry failed. The crew were told to stay up for another orbit and land manually, the first time a Soviet crew had done so. Belyayev had to lie across both seats to see through the orientation window while Leonov held him in place, then fire the retro-rocket by hand.

Because of the delay and the difficulty of aligning the craft, Voskhod 2 came down hundreds of kilometres from its target, in deep snow in the taiga (forest) of the Perm region in the Ural Mountains, on 19 March 1965. The descent module lodged between trees, and it took time for searchers to find the crew. Leonov and Belyayev spent their first night alone in the capsule in the freezing forest. Rescuers on skis reached them the next day, and after a second night in a makeshift hut they skied to a clearing to be flown out.

Key people

• Alexei Leonov (1934-2019): pilot of Voskhod 2, the first person to walk in space.
• Pavel Belyayev (1925-1970): commander of Voskhod 2, who flew the manual re-entry.
• Sergei Korolev (1907-1966): chief designer whose bureau built the spacecraft.

Consequences

The Soviet Union announced the achievement as another triumph, while for years it said little about the dangers. Less than three months later, on 3 June 1965, Ed White made the first American spacewalk during Gemini 4. Both crews found working outside a spacecraft far harder than expected, and NASA spent the rest of the Gemini programme developing handholds, foot restraints and underwater training to make spacewalks manageable.

Voskhod 2 was the last crewed flight of the Voskhod programme; further planned Voskhod missions, including one intended to last about two weeks, were cancelled as resources shifted to Soyuz and the Moon. Korolev died in January 1966, and the next Soviet crewed flight, on the new Soyuz spacecraft, did not take place until 1967.

Leonov trained to land on the Moon in the Soviet lunar programme, which was cancelled. He commanded Soyuz 19 during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975, when he shook hands in orbit with American astronaut Thomas Stafford. He later held senior posts in cosmonaut training, painted many space scenes, and co-wrote a memoir with the Apollo astronaut David Scott.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

Myth: the spacewalk went exactly to plan. For decades the official story suggested a smooth success. Leonov’s own later accounts revealed the ballooning suit and his improvised pressure reduction.

Fact: wild animals were a real concern. The crew feared wolves and bears in the forest. Leonov later said this experience contributed to the decision to give cosmonauts a special survival pistol, the TP-82, carried on Soyuz missions from the 1980s.

Timeline

• 1964, 12 October: Voskhod 1 carries the first three-person crew.
• 1965, 18 March: Voskhod 2 is launched; Leonov makes the first spacewalk on the second orbit.
• 1965, 19 March: After the automatic system fails, the crew lands manually in the Ural forest.
• 1965, 21 March: Leonov and Belyayev are brought out of the forest.
• 1965, 3 June: Ed White makes the first American spacewalk on Gemini 4.
• 1975, 17 July: Leonov’s Soyuz 19 docks with an Apollo spacecraft in orbit.
• 2019, 11 October: Alexei Leonov dies in Moscow, aged 85.

Why it matters

Leonov’s spacewalk proved that a human could survive and work outside a spacecraft, a skill later essential for Moon landings, repairing satellites and building space stations. It also showed how dangerous the early space race was, and how quick thinking by its crews often made up for rushed engineering.