Voskhod 2 lifted off successfully and the two cosmonauts began preparations for the EVA as soon as they reached orbit. First, Belyayev expanded the rubber airlock to its full length. Then Leonov, aided by Belyayev, strapped on his life-support pack. Once the pressure between the airlock and the ship was equalized, Belyayev opened the inner hatch allowing Leonov to crawl headfirst into the airlock and hook himself up to the tether. Then Belyayev shut the inner hatch and depressurized the airlock. Leonov emerged, becoming the first human to walk in space. The Sun almost blinded him. His first words were: ‘I can see the Caucasus.’ But after twelve minutes in open space Leonov found himself in a perilous situation:

Near the end of my walk I realized that my feet had pulled out of my shoes and my hands had pulled away from my gloves. My entire suit stretched so much that my hands and feet appeared to shrink. I was unable to control them. I couldn’t get back in straightaway. My space suit had ballooned out and the pressure was quite considerable. I was tired and couldn’t go in feet first as I had been taught to do.

Leonov decreased the pressure in his suit hoping that it would make it more flexible.

Then I felt freer and I could move about more easily. Then I pushed myself into the airlock head first, with my arms holding the rails. I had to turn myself upside down in the airlock in order to enter the ship feet first and this was very difficult.

His pulse raced to 143 beats per minute, his breathing was twice normal levels, and his body temperature was up to 38°C. He was drenched in sweat and exhausted. Finally, the outer hatch was closed, giving a total depressurized time of 23 minutes and 41 seconds. They cast off the airlock and settled down to a one-day mission.

But there was another problem. The hatch on the ship had not been shut properly and was leaking air, which was being compensated by the life-support system. The result was that the capsule was becoming rich in oxygen, which increased the possibility of a fire. A tiny spark could set off an explosion. They lowered the oxygen during the rest of the mission, bringing it down to manageable levels before re-entry. It would not be the last time that an oxygen-rich atmosphere inside a capsule would pose a risk.

The problems kept coming. By the thirteenth orbit, pressure in the fuel tanks had dropped dramatically, bringing with it the possibility of the complete depressurization of the spacecraft. Fortunately it stabilized. When the re-entry burn came around on the seventeenth orbit, Belyayev calmly reported, ‘Negative automatic retrofire.’ Korolev immediately told Belyayev to use the manual system. The numbered code to unlock the attitude controls was found and was handed to Gagarin, who transmitted the information to Belyayev.

The exercise of orienting the spacecraft became an ordeal, if not a fiasco. They had to use an optical sighting device but both men were clad in bulky spacesuits. In the cramped space, Belyayev, optical device in hand, had to lie horizontally across both seats while Leonov tucked himself under his seat. At the same time, Leonov held Belyayev in place so as to keep him in front of the porthole so he could use both his hands to orient the ship with respect to the Earth’s day–night divide, or terminator, as it is called, using the hand controls. After this was done they quickly returned to their seats to re-establish the ship’s centre of gravity before firing the retrorocket. The 46 seconds it took to get back resulted in a serious overshoot of the original landing zone. As with several previous missions, the instrument compartment failed to separate from the descent capsule and the two modules remained connected by the flailing steel straps. It resulted in a steeper than usual descent and more G force, bursting blood vessels in both men’s eyes.

They landed in dense woodland, far from any settlement. One of the pilots in a search helicopter reported: ‘On the forest road between the villages of Sorokouaya and Shchuchino. About 30 km southwest of the town of Berezniki, I see the red parachute and the two cosmonauts. There is deep snow all around.’ The denseness of the trees made it impossible for helicopters to land. Warm clothing was dropped from one, while another landed 5 km away. When Leonov asked how soon rescuers would pick them up, Belyayev joked, ‘Maybe in three months, they’ll pick us up with dog sleds.’ They spent an uncomfortable night in the woods.

Incredibly, ignoring the obvious risk they had taken, Korolev raised a toast to the future: ‘Friends! Before us is the Moon. Let us all work together with the great goal of conquering the Moon.’ It was not to be.

The first manned Gemini mission, Gemini 3, with Grissom – becoming the first person to make two spaceflights – and Young on board was launched on 23 March 1965. It was a brief flight of just three orbits lasting a total of just under five hours. During that time they changed orbits, at one time achieving an orbit that had a low point of just 85 km. Their flight was successful but after splashdown the build-up of heat within the capsule was too much for the astronauts so they abandoned Gemini 3 in their spacesuits, and they walked along the traditional red carpet on the recovery ship in their underwear! After splashdown Grissom was also seasick. ‘Gemini may be a good spacecraft but she’s a lousy ship,’ he said.

Commander of Gemini 4, the mission that was to undertake the first US spacewalk, was Jim McDivitt. He later commented that by the time the US started Gemini, the space race was over. He talked about the importance of the Gemini program:

In Mercury, you couldn’t manoeuvre. You could change its attitude but you couldn’t change its flight path. Gemini you could. So, now you had to have the guy in the spacecraft working with the guy on the ground to know what was going on and where they were going, where they were, and […] what was going to happen. So, that worked out pretty well. As a matter of fact, I think if it hadn’t been for Gemini, flying Apollo would’ve been nigh on impossible.

McDivitt tells a funny story about getting picked to fly on Gemini 4:

I was called in and told I was going to command it, and then some time later it was announced at an astronaut pilots’ meeting and then finally they were going to make the public announcement. And so, I thought I’d tell my kids about it. So, one Saturday morning we were sitting having breakfast at a long table we had. And so, we finally got to this dramatic moment and I said, ‘Kids, I’m going to tell you something really important.’ And, let’s see, this was in about ’64 or so. I think they were, like, eight and seven and five or so. And so, I tell them that, you know, ‘You know that dad’s an astronaut and the astronauts fly in space. I just want to let you know that I’m going to fly in space soon.’ And my older boy, Mike, who was probably seven or eight, says, ‘Oh yeah, dad, I heard that at school.’ And then my daughter Ann said, ‘Oh yeah, dad, I heard that at school, too.’ And my son Patrick said, ‘Dad, there’s a fly in the milk bottle.’

The USA’s first spacewalk was carried out by Ed White, of whom McDivitt said:

My relationship with Ed couldn’t have been better. He was the best friend I ever had. We lived, like I said, a block and a half or so apart. He was getting a Master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, but he didn’t have an aeronautical engineering undergraduate degree. So, we took a lot of classes together. We started flying together. I remember when the Air Force had its pre-astronaut, pre-NASA astronaut selection – I walked in the room in the Pentagon and Ed was already there and he says, ‘I knew you’d be there!’ And I said, ‘I knew you’d be here, too!’ Unfortunately as regards our EVA we were beaten by the Russians by, what? A couple of weeks I guess. They were quiet up until a few days before the flight. I think originally it was to score the first!

Gemini 4 was dispatched to space on 3 June – the USA’s first multi-day mission – and once in orbit they turned their attention to the spacewalk. McDivitt recalls:

White was outside for 21 minutes and had to be told to come back in by the Capcom Gus Grissom. Gemini 4 was headed for the Earth’s shadow. ‘This is the saddest moment of my life,’ replied White.

McDivitt continues the story:

That was one of the reasons I was kind of anxious to have him get back inside the spacecraft, because I’d like to do this in the daylight, not in the dark. But by the time he got back in, it was dark. So, when we went to close the hatch, it wouldn’t close. It wouldn’t lock. And so, in the dark I was trying to fiddle around over on the side where I couldn’t see anything, trying to get my glove down in this little slot to push the gears together. And finally, we got that done and got it latched.

For Gene Kranz, Gemini 4 was one of the most exciting of the Gemini missions. It was his first as Flight Director:

In June, following their spectacular Gemini 4 flight, James McDivitt and Edward White flew up to Washington from Houston with their wives and children. The helicopter bearing them had no sooner settled on the White House lawn than Lady Bird Johnson said she wanted them all to spend the night; babysitters would be provided. The two astronauts heard the President call them ‘Christopher Columbuses of the 20th century’, and pronounced that the United States had now caught up with the Russians. They lunched with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Congressional leaders, and in the evening they went to the State Department for a reception. Before a packed assemblage of foreign diplomats they showed a 20-minute movie of their flight, which included the first American spacewalk. In strode Lyndon B. Johnson, who told McDivitt and White, ‘I want you to join our delegation in Paris.’ Furthermore, the President wanted them to go now, as soon as they and their wives could pack. He was seething because the Russians had humbled the Americans at the Paris Air Show, where Yuri Gagarin was standing by his spacecraft, shaking hands with everybody and passing out Vostok pins. The French press noted that the lacklustre American pavilion was shunned by the crowds.

Patricia McDivitt and Patricia White wailed in unison, ‘But we have nothing to wear!’ Never mind, said LBJ, Lady Bird and Lynda and Luci (his daughters) have plenty of clothes. The ladies retired to the White House bedrooms, and the two Patricias were duly outfitted. Long after midnight the presidential plane took off with them on board as well as Vice President Humphrey, James Webb, and Charles Mathews, the Gemini program manager. They made it only in time for the last day and a half of the eleven-day show, but they gave the Russians some real competition. Wherever they appeared, the American jumeaux de space were followed by crowds. ‘A partial recovery for the United States’ was the Paris newspapers’ verdict.

Two months later Gemini 5 was launched with Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad on board. Cooper says:

Our Gemini 5 flight. We worked long and hard at it, and we couldn’t do any EVA or do the other things because we were so loaded. We were absolutely crammed with equipment of all kinds they wanted us to have. We had the first fuel cell. We had the first radar. We had the first all up computer. These were all things that needed to be tested and proven. So we named it ‘Eight Days or Bust’.

The Gemini flights before that didn’t have any name or any patches; and Pete and I decided that since everybody in the military, every pilot in the military, has an organizational patch, and they take great pride in their patches, we decided we were going to have a patch. So we designed and had some made, and had them sewn on our flight suits; and two nights before the launch, we were invited to fly back to Houston and have dinner with Jim Webb (NASA Administrator) at Bob Gilruth’s house. We decided this would be an opportunity to confess our sins, so we told him about the patch, with which he went almost into hysterics! And he and Pete almost had fisticuffs. So we got this all broken up; and he finally said, ‘Okay. Tomorrow I want you to send somebody up to Washington with a copy of this patch so I can see what it is, and I’ll tell you whether you can fly it or not.’ So, the following day, he took a look at the patch and then wired us back down an approval. He said, ‘From now on, it’ll be called a “Cooper patch”. I will approve it on one condition.’ He said, ‘I don’t like the “Eight Days or Bust” cause if you only do seven days, then the public’s going to say, “You busted.”’ So he said, ‘If you’ll tape over the “Eight Days”.’

At the start of Gemini 5 in August 1965 the oxygen pressure dropped to practically zero. According to the mission rules the correct procedure was to switch everything off. Says Cooper:

I had to go into total power down. So we powered everything down, brought everything down to low, low electrical power; and, of course, it happened again when we were out of radio range. So, as we came whistling over the horizon into communication, Houston realized we were all powered down and they really panicked for a moment; and it looked like we were going to have to re-enter another orbit later. But fortunately, and this is a story a lot of people don’t know, when Pete and I were going through the altitude chamber with Gemini 5, we had to go through and do these various tests; and the tests finished on a Friday; the spacecraft was due to be shipped Saturday morning to the Cape from St Louis in order to stay on the time schedule. But one of the things we wanted to do was, we wanted to run some tests in the altitude chamber by decreasing both oxygen and hydrogen pressure, drastically, to see if the fuel cell would continue to run at altitude. NASA said, ‘No, we can’t afford the time […] and if we do it over the weekend, it would cost us triple time of overtime, so we’re not going to do it.’ So Pete and I went to Jim McDonnell, head of McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and told him the story on it, and he said, ‘I’ll pay for it. Let’s do it.’ So we spent the weekend in the altitude chamber at his cost doing the tests.

The knowledge they gained enabled them to stay in orbit longer.

Finally, the United States had taken the space endurance record. Korolev extended the planned Voskhod 3’s duration from ten to fifteen days and then to twenty days. Then at a meeting of the Military-Industrial Commission on 16 December 1965, the Soviet government added one more condition to the Voskhod program: that Korolev launch two Voskhods in time for the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party in March 1966 as a salute to the Party. It was an unrealistic deadline. Things were falling apart. In the event, the Russians did not launch another manned mission until April 1967 – and then it was a disaster. In the meantime the US launched six manned flights, completing the Gemini project. The next of these were Gemini 6 and 7 – a double mission. Frank Borman flew Gemini 7 with Jim Lovell on the record fourteen-day mission. According to Borman:

In fact, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford nearly didn’t get Gemini 6 into orbit. The plan was for Gemini 6 to launch before Borman’s flight and dock with an Agena target vehicle already in space, but the Agena didn’t get into space. So a homing device was put on Gemini 7 for Gemini 6 to use.

Things were not going well in the USSR. Their unmanned lunar reconnaissance probes were failing. Between January 1963 and December 1965, there had been eleven consecutive failures, a record that had dampened the spirits of even the most optimistic Soviet engineers. Kamanin wrote in his diary: ‘Korolev was more distressed by the setback than anyone. He looked dejected and appeared to have aged ten years.’

In fact, Korolev’s health had been deteriorating seriously throughout 1965. In August he had complained about not feeling well because of low blood pressure, and in September, he had severe headaches. He also had a progressive hearing loss and a serious heart condition. He wrote to his wife: ‘I am holding myself together using all the strength at my command … I can’t continue to work like this, you understand. I’m not going to continue working like this. I’m leaving!’ He knew the Voskhods would be unable to achieve what Gemini had.

Worried by the stagnation, a group of experienced cosmonauts, along with Kamanin, wrote a letter to Brezhnev on 22 October 1965. They emphasized the gridlock in the space program because of its complicated management system, the undue focus on automated systems over piloted ones, and the poor funding. Gagarin personally handed the letter to Brezhnev’s aides, but three months later, they were still waiting for an acknowledgement.