The first spacewalk in history
On March 18, 1965, cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov exited his Voskhod 3KD spacecraft, becoming the first human in history to perform a spacewalk. Leonov spent nearly 24 minutes outside of his capsule, of which 12 minutes were spent spacewalking. The historic achievement showed that it was possible for humans to work outside of their spacecraft, but it was not without incident.
Approximately eight minutes in, Leonov’s suit, including his gloves and boots, began to fill with oxygen. Worried that he wouldn’t be able to coil his rope and return through the airlock, the cosmonaut dropped the suit’s pressure down to life-threatening levels, “but I had no choice,” he said many years later, in a decision that likely saved his life.
“I had firm instructions from the research department to report to mission control everything I was doing, even more so my decision to lower pressure inside the spacesuit,” Leonov told the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale during a 2015 interview. “I broke the rules and didn’t report to mission control to avoid spreading panic, and raise a whole host of questions. After all, nobody could have helped me in that situation.”
