🚨Soviet Astronaut Floats in Space

Mar. 19, 1965 - A Soviet Air Force officer, who yesterday became the first man to leave an orbiting spacecraft and float in space, was still circling the Earth early today in the capsule with a fellow astronaut.

Lieut. Col. Alexei Leonov, 30 years old, left the two-man Voskhod 2 as it passed over the Soviet Union while completing it first orbit and beginning its second. He stayed outside the cabin for 10 minutes, according to Tass, official Soviet press agency.

The spaceship, piloted by Col. Pavel Belyayev, 39, was launched at 10 a.m. Moscow time yesterday, 2 a.m. Eastern standard time. The launching site, not announced at first, was later said to be the cosmodrome Baekonur in Kazakhstan. All previous Soviet manned space shots have originated there. 

Vasily Seleznev, a leading Soviet space official, said on Moscow television yesterday that “the target before us now is the moon, and we hope to reach it in no distant future,” the Associated Press reported. 

As Col. Leonov traveled through space tethered to his ship at a speed of nearly five miles a second, he was shielded by a specially equipped space suit. This protected him from the intense heat of the sun.

Specialists said that even the slightest penetration of his suit by the sun’s rays would have caused instant death.

If the five-yard rope lifeline that connected him with the ship had broken, he could have been lost, orbiting the Earth as a human satellite. His body would have burned up on reentry after a week or perhaps months of orbiting.

His space suit was not equipped with any devices by which he could have steered his way back to the spacecraft. 

An American astronaut — Maj. James McDivitt of the Air Force — will be directly exposed to space on the second Gemini flight, possibly in June.

He will open the hatch and stick his head out briefly to test the Gemini suit’s ability to protect him.

American astronauts are scheduled to move around outside the Gemini capsule some time in 1966, but further progress with the space suit conceivably could speed that up.

Support this project at patreon.com/realtime1960s