First space-walker nearly died in the struggle to return to his craft

Moments after Alexei Leonov stepped outside his capsule to make the first spacewalk in 1965, the voice of Leonid Brezhnev crackled through the headphones inside his helmet. ‘‘We members of the Politburo are here sitting and watching what you are doing. We are proud of you,’’ the Soviet leader said.

‘‘I’m feeling perfect,’’ Leonov, then 30, said from some 500 kilometres above Earth, orbiting at about 30,000kmh. His mood was about to change – not that the public would know. Though the 12 minutes and 9 seconds that he spent outside the Voskhod 2 craft were history-making, it would be decades before it emerged that the mission went less smoothly than the official account suggested.

The lack of atmospheric pressure in space deformed his spacesuit and expanded it like a balloon. His hands slipped out of his gloves. He could not pull himself back towards the craft along the five-metre-long tether, or fit through the airlock and, in a couple of minutes, the orbit would move the ship away from the sun and plunge him into darkness.

Drenched in sweat, Leonov opened an oxygen release valve, deflating his suit at the risk of depriving himself of oxygen. He hauled himself towards the airlock, squeezing through headfirst – the wrong way – and somehow turned around in the cramped chamber to close the hatch, almost blind from the perspiration fogging his helmet.

Leonov rejoined Pavel Belyayev, the commander of the two-man mission, but they noticed that the oxygen level was inexplicably soaring inside the craft, making the cabin highly flammable. An electrical spark could trigger an explosion. The level decreased but the automatic re-entry guidance system malfunctioned, forcing the pair to fire the retro-rockets manually.

Then the landing module failed to separate from the orbital module as quickly as planned, causing the craft to spin amid G-forces so strong that blood vessels burst in the cosmonauts’ eyes.

Despite these ordeals, Leonov and Belyayev made it back to Earth, but 2000km from their target site, crash-landing in a snowbound forest in Siberia. ‘‘Even though mission control had no idea where we were or whether we had survived, our families were informed that we had landed safely and were resting in a secluded dacha before returning to Moscow,’’ Leonov wrote in Two Sides of the Moon, Our Story of the Cold War Space Race (2004), a dual autobiography he co-wrote with the American astronaut David Scott.

Leonov wondered who would reach them first: rescuers or the wolves and bears in the forest. He fretted that the moisture in his sweat-soaked suit put him at risk of frostbite. It would be hours before the cosmonauts were spotted by a search party. Leonov was not in the mood to provide a lengthy chronicle of the mission to a government committee. ‘‘I reported one sentence: ‘If a man has a proper suit and proper training, he is able to work in open space.’ That’s it. End of report.’’

With the spacewalk on March 18, 1965, the Soviet space programme had added another first to its accomplishments, which already included the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, and the first man in space, Leonov’s friend Yuri Gagarin. The reward of the hastily arranged mission was worth the risk.

Only 10 months later, Ed White became the first American to walk in space. It appeared that Leonov had a strong chance of going to the moon, but US advances that culminated in the lunar landing of 1969, added to a series of Soviet technical setbacks, put paid to that ambition.

Leonov did, though, return to space in 1975 as commander of the Soviet crew for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a joint US-Soviet mission that signified the end of the space race and led him to develop close friendships with several American astronauts.

Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was born in Listvyanka, Siberia, as one of 12 children. When he was 3, his father was imprisoned during a Stalinist purge after being falsely accused by a colleague of being an ‘‘enemy of the people’’ after a dispute over a horse. He was later cleared.

Leonov considered becoming an artist. Instead, pursuing a dream he held since the age of 6, he trained as an air force pilot before being selected for the gruelling cosmonaut training regime in 1960. While a cadet, he met Svetlana Pavlovna, a trainee teacher. They married in 1959. She survives him, along with their daughter, Oksana. Another daughter, Viktoria, died in 1996.

In 1969 Leonov was in a motorcade with three other cosmonauts, heading to the Kremlin with Brezhnev for a ceremony to mark a successful space mission. A gunman aiming to assassinate the leader instead sprayed bullets at Leonov’s car, killing the driver.

After a stint as deputy director of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, Leonov retired from the military in 1991 and worked in senior roles for a Moscow-based financial group. He painted space scenes as a hobby and created the first artwork in space – a drawing of the sunrise that was sketched in zero gravity using coloured pencils while he was on Voskhod 2. A crater on the far side of the moon is named after him.

He died on the same day that two astronauts carried out a spacewalk as part of a battery replacement project on the International Space Station. Nasa said in a statement: ‘‘His venture into the vacuum of space began the history of extravehicular activity that makes today’s Space Station maintenance possible.’’

They crash-landed in a Siberian forest. Leonov wondered who would reach them first: rescuers or the wolves and bears.