USSR’s Aleksei Leonov made first-ever spacewalk 50 years ago today

MOSCOW, March 18. /TASS/. March 18, 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the first walk in space. On that day the Soviet Union’s cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, who last year turned 80, left the Voskhod-2 spacecraft in a special spacesuit to spend several minutes outside. With this accomplishment Leonov and everybody who had contributed to its success laid the basis for lasting manned space missions that would follow, specialists say. The first spacewalk was a graphic illustration a human being was able to exist in a dramatically new environment, hostile to all life, the director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems under the Russian Academy of Sciences, Igor Ushakov, has said. "Man become a celestial body in outer space in a sense. A new era was ushered in - an era of extra-vehicular activity. It was the first important stride forward towards inter-planetary flights," Ushakov said. The whole spacewalk procedure lasted 23 minutes, including 12 minutes Leonov spent outside the spacecraft. Three months later, on June 3, 1965, US Astronaut Edward White became the first American to have followed in Leonov’s footsteps to make a spacewalk from the Gemini spacecraft, which continued a total of 36 minutes. The Soviet Union’s Svetlana Savitskaya, daughter of Air Marshal Yevgeny Savitsky, became the first woman to venture into outer space from the orbital station Salyut-7 on July 25, 1984. The first American woman to make a spacewalk was Kathryn Sullivan, She was a crew member of the Challenger space shuttle. The first European astronaut to try himself at extra-vehicular activity was France’s Jean-Loup Chretien during a mission on board the Soviet orbiting station Mir. And the first Chinese in outer space was Zhai Zhigang, a crew member of the Shenzhou-7 spacecraft. He made the space walk in September 2008. The first-ever spacewalk will remain in history as one of the brightest pages in the history of space exploration, several US astronauts have told TASS, adding that Leonov would be always remembered as a "trailblazer" and a "giant". The twelve-minute stay outside the Voskhod-2 spacecraft was the riskiest undertaking. In those days knowledge about the specifics of space walks was scarce. At a certain point Leonov realized that he was unable to get back into the airlock, because his spacesuit inflated in the vacuum. Of his own accord Leonov opened a valve to allow some of the suit’s pressure to bleed off and was barely able to get into the hatch. Leonov’s spacewalk, and also his participation in the Soyuz-Apollo space project, paved the way for international space cooperation, said Elliot Pullham, the head of the US non-governmental organization Space Foundation. Read more