The Comedy of Errors That Was the First-Ever Space Walk
Today, NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station conducted a spacewalk to prepare the station for a future power upgrade. While this extravehicular excursion had already been postponed due to a medical emergency, moving and working in the vacuum of space has become routine for the astronauts. Of course, it wasn’t always this way.
On this day 61 years ago, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first human being to emerge from a spaceship with nothing between his fragile body and the punishing abyss of space except a few layers of matter. Attached to the Voskhod ship by a sort of umbilical cord, Leonov floated freely for about 10 minutes before being recalled.
That’s when things started to go wrong.
Due to the pressure differences, Leonov’s spacesuit had inflated like a balloon, causing his hands to slip out of the gloves. To travel the 16-foot distance, he was forced to wrap the rope around his arm until he regained contact with his ship.
“My suit was deforming, my hands were out of the gloves, my feet were out of the boots. The suit felt loose around my body,” Leonov later told the BBC.
Once he arrived at the inflatable fabric airlock, Leonov was supposed to fit inside his feet first, but his suit had inflated to such a level that it no longer fit him. To make matters worse, the spacecraft was only minutes out of orbit in Earth’s shadow, which meant it would soon find itself struggling in total darkness.
So Leonov made a decision. Without notifying Soviet ground control, he began bleeding air from his suit to depressurize it – a maneuver that carried risks beyond the loss of precious oxygen. As he did so, Leonov began to feel “tingling” in his extremities, a telltale sign of decompression sickness. Yet it was his only option for survival.
“I had no choice, I had no recourse,” he once told NASA in an interview.
Thinning his suit helped him regain some control, but he soon discovered that squeezing through the airlock feet first still wasn’t going to work. To gain the necessary leverage, he was forced to go in headfirst. This meant he had to turn around in the cramped airlock to close the hatch behind him – the equivalent of attempting a handstand in a telephone booth. Dripping with sweat, he finally managed to turn his body around, close the hatch and join Commander Pavel Belyayev in the descent module.
His relief was short-lived. With oxygen saturation reaching dangerous levels, threatening to spark deadly fires in the module, the automatic re-entry system failed. The two men would have to try something that had never been attempted before: manually firing the retro-rockets so that they entered the atmosphere at the correct angle. If their approach was too superficial, they would bounce into space; too deep and they would crash violently into Earth.
It worked. After a grueling but precisely controlled burn, the cosmonauts were finally on their way home – they just didn’t know where. While American astronauts of the time enjoyed comfortable landings in the oceans, the Soviets, lacking naval superiority, were forced to welcome their cosmonauts more roughly on land.
After passing through the atmosphere, the parachutes deployed and they eventually landed in the Siberian wilderness. Leonov, who had just become the first man to survive in the cold vacuum of space, now had to endure a night spent in the cold Siberian winter.
The two men sent a coded transmission relaying their location, then hunkered down to spend the evening in the icy descent module. A Soviet relief team reached them the next day, bringing supplies, a makeshift shelter, and a cauldron. “They landed 9 kilometers away and came on skis,” Leonov told the BBC. “They built us a little cabin and brought us a big cauldron which we filled with water and lit on a fire. Then we washed in it.”
The next day, they put on their own skis to head toward the helicopter that would finally take them home.
Although their mission was a grueling ordeal, punctuated by calamities, what stood out to Leonov was not the complications. Instead, this was what he experienced in that brief moment, floating miles above our planet.
“You just can’t understand it,” he said. “It is only there that we can feel the grandeur, the immense size of everything that surrounds us.”
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Main image: supamotion.co / Shutterstock
