March 18, 1965

Voskhod 2

Alexei Leonov performs the first human spacewalk

The world's first spacewalker could not bend enough to get home — until he deliberately bled pressure from his own suit.

18 March 1965: out through the inflatable airlock

Voskhod 2 launched from Baikonur on 18 March 1965 carrying commander Pavel Belyayev and pilot Alexei Leonov — and, attached to the spacecraft, a deployable inflatable airlock called Volga. The Vostok-derived cabin could not simply be depressurized, so the airlock let Leonov go outside while Belyayev stayed pressurized within.

Leonov passed through the inflated tube on a 7-metre lifeline and floated free of the spacecraft: the first human extravehicular activity. He spent 12 minutes 9 seconds floating freely — and 23 minutes 41 seconds in vacuum once his time in the airlock is counted.

The suit that nearly kept him outside

In vacuum, Leonov's Berkut suit expanded and stiffened. Unable to bend enough to re-enter normally, he lowered the suit's pressure — accepting the risk of decompression sickness — and forced himself back through the airlock.

Cameras mounted in and outside the airlock recorded the spacewalk, though Leonov could not operate the shutter of his chest-mounted still camera. By the end of 18 March he was safely back aboard; history's first spacewalk was complete.

What the spacewalk proved

The flight demonstrated that a human could leave a pressurized spacecraft, work in vacuum, and return — while exposing serious hazards in suit mobility, heat removal, airlock re-entry and recovery procedures.

The mission's landing ordeal belonged to the next day: after a manual re-entry under Belyayev's control on 19 March, the capsule came down 386 kilometres from its intended zone.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 3 audit passes

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