Space Walk
LEONOV NODDED TO BELYAEV. THEY checked their timers and instruments. They had been breathing pure oxygen. “We are free of nitrogen now,” Pavel I. Belyaev, commander of the Diamond (Voshkod 11) told his fellow cosmonaut. “Ready,” Alexei A. Leonov nodded.
Moments later their suits inflated to full pressure as the two men prepared for any emergencies.
Leonov released his restraint harness, turned for Belyaev to check his backpack. Leonov received all his power from a battery pack and oxygen bottles integrated within his suit. A large airlock extended from the side of the spacecraft. Leonov floated toward the airlock and sealed the hatch behind him. Now he depressurized the airlock itself, secured a safety tether to the airlock interior. When the gauges read zero pressure, he opened the upper hatch to the void of space.
Leonov floated, and then pushed himself gently through the hatch. “I’m getting out,” he radioed to Belyaev. His excited commander radioed the mission control center outside Moscow. “At this moment,” he called with unrestrained elation, “a man is floating free in space!”
The first human satellite drifted away from Voshkod, turning and tumbling slowly, weightless, stunned with the sight of the earth below. He rolled about to look into a “flow of blindingly bright sunlight, like an arc of electric welding.” He pulled gently on his lifeline and hurtled toward Voshkod’s hull. He quickly put out a hand to check himself and bounced into a spin. He had learned something about the fickle ways of force and reaction in the weightlessness and vacuum of space. A small camera attached to the top of the airlock captured the smiling, laughing cosmonaut as he cavorted in mankind’s first walk in space—the flight of the Diamond on March 18, 1965.
The flight plan called for ten minutes in space. For those ten minutes, across a distance of three thousand miles, the thirty-year-old lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Force, a skilled parachutist, fighter pilot, and world-class athlete, threw out his arms in rapturous joy as he floated and turned. Below him, passing 120 miles below, the earth rolled by at 17,400 miles an hour.
“I didn’t experience fear,” he explained later. “There was only a sense of the infinite expanse and depth of the universe.”
After ten minutes he turned for a final look at the beautiful planet rolling beneath him and then slid into the airlock, feet first. He became jammed in the opening. The minutes sped by, and Belyaev cautioned him that he was running low on his oxygen supply. Leonov breathed deeply and slowly, concentrating. He found the problem. His suit had expanded and he was caught like a cork in a bottle. Slowly and carefully, he partially depressurized the suit and, using his athletic strength, pushed himself back into the airlock. Opening the airlock’s inner hatch, he pushed himself back into the cabin. Belyaev dragged him to his seat, securing his harness. Both men checked the security of the inner hatch. “Let it go,” Belyaev said. They worked the panel controls and the airlock disconnected and drifted away from the Diamond.
The first EVA (Extra-Vehicular Activity) was now history. Belyaev studied Leonov. “He looks like a man who has just been reborn, a man who has just come back from another world.” In his excitement he banged a fist on Leonov’s shoulder and shouted, “Molodets!”
His voice carried to the control center. Hearing the cry of “Great show!” from Belyaev, controllers cheered and applauded.
While the world heralded this new, spectacular Soviet space feat, the flight of the Diamond suddenly became a misadventure and a classic example of how many serious things could go wrong on one brief flight.
Trouble loomed the day after the space walk when it came time to fire the retro-rockets for return to earth. The automatic stabilization system failed, and Belyaev and Leonov went through the proper contingency maneuvers for Belyaev to take over manual control of the spacecraft. This took time, and they delayed the retrofire one orbit. When the commander finally triggered the rockets, he did a magnificent job of guiding his ship through the harrowing reentry. But the extra orbit pushed their new landing site nearly a thousand miles east of where recovery forces waited, at the intended touchdown point.
The two cosmonauts caused the craft to overshoot the landing site by an additional two hundred meters when they had to leave their seats for visual confirmation of instrument and control settings while they aligned the craft for retrofire. This would have meant nothing if they still had had automatic altitude control. But they didn’t, and their movement slightly changed Diamond’s center of gravity. The craft crashed in the thick forests near Perm, in the Ural Mountains. Diamond was not equipped with Vostok-like ejection seats, and there were no personal parachutes on board. Only the spacecraft had parachutes. The cosmonauts were not able to escape the craft and remained inside as Diamond fired its landing rocket shortly before touchdown.
Official news stories stated that Diamond had landed in deep snow when, in fact, the spacecraft had crashed in the forest and had wedged itself tightly between two large fir trees.
Leonov and Belyaev remained inside the Voshkod, unable to open their hatch.
In the freezing night, the cabin fans were going at full blast, the electrical system so twisted that the cosmonauts were unable to shut down the whirling blades. Ironically, while the cooling fans worked, the heating system had failed.
A recovery helicopter arrived at the scene two and a half hours after the landing, and official Moscow expressed great relief that the embarrassing affair would soon be over. But the deep snow and thick forest cover made it impossible for the chopper to land safely.
The helicopter crew dropped warm clothes to the shivering men, but the clothes fell into the higher branches, out of the reach of the cosmonauts, who would have been unable to retrieve them had they dropped right next to the hanging capsule, as the men were trapped inside the ship.
So the clothes remained in the upper reaches of the trees, Diamond remained jammed between the two firs, and the cosmonauts huddled through a frigid night. The next morning, a rescue crew entered the thick Perm forest on skis and wrestled the spacecraft free of the trees, releasing the freezing cosmonauts from their overnight prison. Hot food and warm clothes soon restored Leonov and Belyaev, who then skied out of the forest to a waiting helicopter.
With confirmation that the two cosmonauts were on their way to Moscow, Soviet officials began putting a positive spin on the flight, emphasizing the importance of the world’s first space walk and downplaying the overshoot and the horrifying night in the forest. A government spokesman explained to the Russians, and the world, that walking in space must be mastered before great stations could be built to orbit the earth.
“But,” he added, “our immediate goal, the target before us, is the moon.”
A clear warning of the Soviet intention to get to the moon before Apollo.
That warning and the space walk galvanized Americans. Leonov’s space walk had clearly demonstrated the Soviets’ superiority in space. With commendable candor, NASA’s Chris Kraft complimented the Russians and admitted to the American public that the space walk “was a tremendous surprise, and coming just five days before our first Gemini flight, it caught us completely off guard.”
To make matters worse, the Russians trumpeted the new Voshkod as a spacecraft capable of carrying three men into space. They underscored that it would take at least another four years for the Americans to be able to launch three men within a single craft. One Pravda headline read, “SORRY, APOLLO!” and the accompanying article taunted NASA with the remark, “The gap is not closing, but increasing . . . . The so-called system of free enterprise is turning out to be powerless in competition with socialism in such a complex and modern area as space research.”
The moment unquestionably belonged to the Russians, and in Washington there might have been more concern about the future had officials there known that cosmonaut Pavel Belyaev soon after his return began training for a circumlunar flight, a loop around the moon to be made in about two and a half years, in 1967. Nor were they aware that Alexei Leonov also had been assigned to the group training to go to the moon, would become commander of that program as well, and that Leonov and Oleg Makarov had been selected to make the first two-man circumlunar flight.
But the United States was not standing still. It no longer was stumbling in space, and its program was gathering steam and momentum. Schedules were set and were as much as possible to be met no matter what the effort demanded.
Gemini was next—the bridge between the fledgling Mercury and Project Apollo. Wernher von Braun and his team would sit out Gemini. They were busy perfecting the monster rockets for Apollo—Saturn I for earth orbit tests of the three-man spacecraft and Saturn V, the behemoth to carry astronauts to the moon. At North American Aviation in California, the moon craft was being developed, assembled.
America’s course was set.