On 18 March 1965 Alexei Leonov became the first person to walk in space. He slid from the Voskhod-2 (Sunrise-2) capsule and for 12 minutes and 9 seconds floated in the great beyond 500km above Earth attached to the rest of humanity by a 5.35-meter umbilical cord ...
Getting out of the small spaceship had been relatively easy. Leonov crawled into an airlock. He waited for the air pressure to equalize. Then he slid outside. But Leonov’s inflated spacesuit had ballooned and stiffened. He could not get back through the 1.2-meter-wide airlock.
Leonov would recall:
“My suit was becoming deformed. My hands had slipped out of the gloves [and] my feet came out of the boots. The suit felt loose around my body. I had to do something. I couldn’t pull myself back using the cord. And what’s more, with this misshapen suit, it would be impossible to fit through the airlock.”
Leonov went radio silent, deciding not to speak lest the Americans were listening in. If he died, he would not do to publicly.
The Americans solved the problem by depressurizing the entire spacecraft and eliminating the need for an airlock.
