On March 18, 45 years ago, the Soviet Mission Control Center received the call signs from the crew of the Voskhod-2 spacecraft. An hour and a half later, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first ever man to walk out into space. The walk lasted more than 12 minutes:
"The Earth is shrouded by a light grey mantle, the cosmonaut recalls. Not very beautiful, but when you look at the Earth from the side of the Sun, it's emerald green like a shiny ball from a Christmas tree. And you know, the Black Sea is indeed the darkest one, and the Baltic is grey, and the Caribbean is emerald blue. All depends on sedimentary rock and the depth".
By the end of his spacewalk, Leonov's spacesuit had inflated to the point where he could not re-enter the airlock. If was only after he opened the valve to let some of the suit's pressure out that he was barely able to get back inside the spacecraft.
Another emergency occurred on re-entry. The capsule's automated orientation system failed and the landing had to be manually controlled. As a result, the Voskhod-2 landed in a forest area 180 km north of the city of Perm and the crew had to spend two nights in deep wood in freezing temperatures. Recovery crews had to chop down trees to clear a landing zone for helicopter recovery.
About 3,000 potential emergencies were scrutinized in preparation for the flight. Leonov recalls how, seeing the Voskhod-2 crew off, Chief Rocket Designer Sergei Korolyov told him: "We can't foresee everything. Go, and tell us everything when you are back".
"Sergei Pavlovich said: ‘If you are familiar with 3,000 emergencies, there will be the 3,001st. And if you can cope with 3,000, you will cope with that one too". But there were far more. And we began losing faith in the equipment because we had not expected so many problems. But we fixed them all".
Ten years after, Alexei Leonov and his crewmate Valery Kubasov opened the hatch of the Russian Soyuz after it docked to the U.S. Apollo on the historic first joint flight that ushered in an era of international cooperation in space.
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