18 March 1965: First Spacewalk
On March 18, 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first human being to walk in space, floating outside his Voskhod 2 spacecraft for twelve historic minutes.
Leonov, a 30-year-old Air Force pilot, squeezed through an inflatable airlock attached to the spacecraft and pushed himself into the void. Tethered to the ship by a 17.5-foot cable, he somersaulted through space, gazing down at the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains passing below at 17,000 miles per hour.
“What struck me most was the silence,” Leonov later recalled. “It was a silence I had never experienced on Earth.”
But the triumph nearly ended in tragedy. As Leonov floated outside, his spacesuit ballooned in the vacuum of space, becoming so rigid that he couldn’t bend his arms or legs to reenter the airlock. With only minutes of oxygen remaining, he made a desperate decision—he partially depressurized his suit, risking nitrogen bubbles in his blood (the bends), to regain enough flexibility to squeeze back inside.
The problems didn’t end there. The spacecraft’s automatic landing system failed, forcing Leonov and commander Pavel Belyayev to manually pilot their reentry. They landed in the remote Ural Mountains, spending a freezing night in wolf-inhabited forests before rescue teams located them.
Despite the near-fatal complications, Leonov’s spacewalk marked a crucial milestone in space exploration. The feat came just three months before American astronaut Ed White conducted his own spacewalk during Gemini 4, intensifying the Space Race between the superpowers.
Today, spacewalks are routine—essential for building and maintaining the International Space Station. But each one traces its lineage back to Leonov’s harrowing twelve minutes outside Voskhod 2.
