55 years ago Alexei Leonov was the first to go out into outer space: “It’s easy to come out, but to stay ...”

March 18, 2020 marks 55 years since the day when the USSR pilot cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov made the world's first spacewalk. The Presidential Library’s portal features the collection Outer Space. It contains periodicals, books, newsreel fragments, which spotlight various milestones in the development of cosmonautics, including materials related to the life and career of the person who first went into outer space.

The significance of this moment, in particular, is spotlighted by the rare newsreels of Cosmonautics in the USSR, presented on the Presidential Library’s portal. They depict famous national cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin, German Titov, Valentina Tereshkova, Georgy Beregovoi, and, of course, Alexei Leonov, who, in the most difficult conditions of outer space, completed a responsible task.

Until March 18, 1965, the life of the astronauts in orbit was limited to the internal space of the ship. And on this day, the people of the Earth for the first time saw on a TV how a man left Voskhod-2 in airless space. He pushed off the edge of the airlock and moved smoothly until he was stopped by the tension of the halyard - a special cable connecting the astronaut to the ship. Then they moved together above the Earth. In twelve minutes, while Leonov was in outer space, the ship traveled the distance from the Black Sea to Sakhalin. Later in the book “I Go Out into Outer Space”, Alexei Leonov writes: “A ship, flooded with bright rays of the sun, with loose antennae and needles, looked like a fantastic creature. The ship was equally brightly lit by the sun and the light reflected from the atmosphere of the Earth, which was unfolding in a solemn blue ball below". All this was reflected in the astronaut's paintings - after all, Aleksei Arkhipovich was also an artist.

The astronaut stayed in the outer space for only 12 minutes and 9 seconds, but this event in its importance took the second place after the legendary flight of Yuri Gagarin. After finishing work on the outer lining of the ship, Leonov was supposed to return, but a critical situation arose: he had a spacesuit inflated, and in this state he was not able to enter the airlock hatch, and there was no time left for conversations with the Earth - the oxygen supply was calculated for 30 minutes.

During the flight of the Voskhod-2 spacecraft, abnormal situations on its board occurred repeatedly. It was not only an experiment with the release of Leonov into outer space. When landing, the automatic system failed, and Pavel Belyaev landed the ship manually.

On October 20, 1965, the International Aviation Federation approved a world record for the duration of a person's stay in outer space outside a spacecraft for 12 minutes and 9 seconds and the absolute record for the maximum altitude above the Earth’s surface of the Voskhod-2 spacecraft is 497.7 km. The Federation awarded the cosmonaut Pavel Belyaev a diploma and a FAI medal, and Alexei Leonov the highest award - the Cosmos Gold Medal for the first time in the history of mankind in outer space. The collection “100 Great Records of Aviation and Cosmonautics” provides Leonov’s article “It’s easy to come out, but to stay...”, which was immediately translated into several foreign languages.

In 1975, Leonov, as the greatest professional in his field, together with the American astronaut Thomas Stafford, participated in a unique Soviet-American experiment: for the first time, a system was created in low Earth orbit that consisted of two docked ships, Soyuz and Apollon. A year before the implementation of a unique project about the upcoming flight, the Izvestia newspaper described in detail in a joint interview with the Apollo astronauts visiting the Soyuz, published on June 25, 1974 —the digital copy of the publication is available in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library.

The newspaper said that the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center provided work for American astronauts on a simulator that completely imitated the Soyuz, on a docking simulator, and also worked out the transition from ship to ship on the docking module. “We are all friends - cosmonauts and astronauts, since we are professionals. When we work in space, there are no boundaries, and we speak Russian, English and a mixture of these languages”, - said Stafford in Russian.

The implementation of the Soyuz Apollo project crowned the work of many thousands of people both in our country and in the USA. This flight also went down in history as a major contribution to the exploration of outer space for peaceful purposes, in the interests of all mankind.