Many of us have stories about how we have met famous people in unexpected places and I am no different. Probably one of my more memorable “unexpected meetings” took place about 2000 when I was arriving in Moscow for another in a long string of business trips to Russia for the RAMOS program (see “RAMOS: Russian American Observation Satellites“). While I was reaching for my luggage on the carousel in the international terminal of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, I accidentally bumped into a Russian gentleman in his mid-60s wearing a uniform who was attempting to get his bag as well. We glanced at each other and briefly excused ourselves while exchanging a smile before getting our respective bags and continuing on our separate ways.

Between the lack of sleep after a long overnight flight and being focused on meeting up with others in my group before heading through Russian customs, it took me a half a minute to realize that I recognized that officer: he was the famous Russian cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov who had commanded Soyuz 19 as part of the ASTP mission a quarter of a century earlier and had performed mankind’s very first EVA (extravehicular activity) a decade before that. By the time I realized this, Leonov was already beyond customs and moving out of sight so I never had a chance to talk to him – which might have been a good thing considering I had only a couple of hours of sleep and my internal clock was eight hours out of whack.

With EVAs now almost a routine activity aboard the International Space Station after decades of experience accumulated during the Space Shuttle and Mir/Salyut programs, it is sometimes easy to forget the courage as well as the raw physical strength and endurance of the cosmonauts and astronauts who made the first EVAs back in the mid-1960s. And now with the anniversary of the first EVA upon us, it is a good time to recount the story of Alexei Leonov’s feat during the Soviet Union’s Voskhod 2 mission.

The Voskhod Program

The Voskhod program was the brainchild of the famed Soviet aerospace pioneer, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev. Korolev and his team of talented engineers, scientists and technicians at OKB-1 (the Russian acronym for Experimental Design Bureau-1) were responsible for developing and building many of the rockets and much of space hardware that literally launched the Soviet Union into the Space Age. Their achievements include the first satellite (Sputnik 1), the first animal in orbit (Sputnik 2), the first lunar mission (Luna 1), the first photograph of the far side of the Moon (Luna 3) and the first human in space (Vostok 1) just to name a few.

Even before the completion of the last Vostok mission in June 1963, Korolev recognized that it would be at least a couple of years before his design bureau’s next piloted spacecraft, the Soyuz 7K (the ancestor of the Soyuz TMA-M flown today), would be ready to fly. This left open the possibility that the United States could take the lead in the Space Race with their very capable two-man Gemini spacecraft set to start flying in 1964 (see “The Mission of Gemini 1”). As a stopgap measure, Korolev envisioned modifying the one-man Vostok 3KA spacecraft to carry a larger crew to perform new missions that could compete with the American Gemini program. Called Voskhod (Russian for “sunrise”), this new program would take huge risks in order to generate propaganda and at least maintain the appearance of the Soviet lead in space (see “The Mission of Voskhod 1”).

Like the Vostok 3KA spacecraft which orbited the first cosmonauts, the Voskhod 3KV consisted of two main modules. The first was the 2.3-meter in diameter spherical descent module which carried the crew during their mission and provided all the equipment needed to safely return them to Earth. In order to accommodate a multi-person crew for the Voskhod missions, the original Vostok descent module was substantially modified. The ejection seat originally carried in the one-man Vostok for launch aborts and landings was removed and “Elbrus” couches were inserted at a 90 degree angle to the original seat’s orientation. The control panel and the specially equipped “Vzor” porthole, designed to provide the pilot with visual information about the spacecraft’s orientation, were left in their original locations forcing the Voskhod pilot to look up and to one side to operate them. The new couches included a suspension system to absorb the shock of launch as well as landing and padding was added to the interior of the capsule for additional protection.

The Voskhod descent module also included a much larger and more capable landing system than that used on Vostok whose mission ended with the pilot bailing out after reentry using the ejection seat to make a separate (and softer) landing. With no ejection seat available, Voskhod included two parachutes to slow the capsule’s descent to about 8 to 10 meters per second and a solid braking rocket attached to the parachute lines which fired just before landing to reduce the touchdown speed to only 0.15 meters per second. With no ejection seat and insufficient time to develop a launch escape system, there were no launch abort options for the crew during the earliest phases of the ascent. Only after about 45 seconds of flight did Voskhod have the same abort options available as the earlier Vostok with comparable chances of survival. This gamble meant that the crew would have to trust in the reliability of their launch vehicle until then.

The second major component of the Voskhod, the service module, carried all the equipment not needed for the return to Earth. It was a double cone shape about 2.5 meters in diameter and about as tall. It was connected to the descent module by straps and an umbilical arm designed to burn away in case they failed to separate as intended before reentry. This module carried various consumables for life support, the attitude control system, batteries, telemetry systems, and a liquid propellant TDU-1 retrorocket at its base. Producing 16 kilonewtons of thrust for 45 seconds, the sole purpose of the TDU-1 was to deorbit the spacecraft at the end of its orbital mission. In case of a failure of the TDU-1 system, Voskhod also carried a backup retrorocket package with solid motors attached to the top of the Voskhod descent module. When no longer needed, the cylindrical backup retrorocket package would be jettisoned along with the service module just before reentry.

While in orbit, spacecraft attitude was controlled automatically by gas jets in the service module using inputs from a set of solar and infrared sensors. The cosmonaut could also manually control the orientation of the spacecraft using a spartan control panel included in the descent module. The underside of the service module was covered with radiators to remove waste heat generated by the spacecraft systems. The interior of the service module, like the descent module, was pressurized to provide a laboratory-like environment for the onboard systems to simplify equipment design, testing and thermal control.

Since the 5,300-kilogram launch mass of the baseline Voskhod 3KV exceeded the payload capacity of the 8K72K rocket used to orbit the Vostok spacecraft, a new and more capable launch vehicle designated the 11A57 had to be used. The 11A57, which resembled the earlier 8K72K Vostok rocket but with a larger upper stage, was designed from the start at OKB-1 to be a “unified launcher” that could orbit a range of different unmanned and manned payloads with masses in excess of five metric tons. The configuration of the 11A57 was similar to the first three stages of the four-stage 8K78M Molniya launch vehicle used to launch Soviet lunar and planetary probes starting in early 1964. While the 11A57 used the same propulsion systems and borrowed heavily from other elements of the 8K78M, it employed many new systems which were designed and built from the start to set of strict requirements known as the “3KA Regulations” so that the launch vehicle was man-rated from the start.

The 11A57 was 44 meters tall and had a launch weight of 305 metric tons. With a liftoff thrust of 4,054 kilonewtons, it was capable of placing up to about 5.7 metric tons into low Earth orbit. Its first flight took place on November 16, 1963 when it successfully orbited the prototype of the Vostok-based 11F69 Zenit-4 reconnaissance satellite designated Kosmos 22. The first use of the 11A57 on a crewed flight was for the Voskhod 1 mission launched on October 12, 1964. Eventually called the Voskhod launch vehicle, the 11A57 was the ancestor of the much improved and modernized Soyuz launch vehicle still in use today.

The “Vykhod” Mission

As work progressed through 1963 developing the three-man Voskhod 3KV to beat the two-man Gemini to the first multi-person spaceflight, NASA made it clear that it would attempt a “spacewalk” or EVA for the first time during one of its early Gemini flights. Gaining experience working in the vacuum of space was essential for future spaceflight plans including eventually walking on the lunar surface. Korolev, like other space planners of the time, appreciated the need to perform EVAs and had already been considering plans to develop this capability as well.

One of the early EVA mission concepts Korolev and his staff at OKB-1 considered, designated “Vykhod” (Russian for “exit”), called for launching a dog into orbit wearing a spacesuit inside of a sealed container. Once in orbit, the air inside the container would be vented into space allowing the spacesuit and the dog’s responses to be tested. With NASA planning to perform its first EVA during 1965, the decision was made to scrap this conservative approach of in-flight testing with animals and perform an EVA during a manned flight.

By late 1963, a second variant of the Voskhod, designated 3KD, was on the drawing boards specifically designed to demonstrate a simple EVA in orbit. Unlike NASA’s Gemini, it was impractical for the Voskhod crew cabin to be depressurized because the equipment inside it was not designed to operate in a vacuum and because of the large amount of air needed to repressurize the whole cabin. To work around these problems in time to beat Gemini, Korolev and his engineers came up with the idea of using a separate airlock to allow a cosmonaut to exit the spacecraft without the need of depressurizing the main cabin. Because of the extra mass of the required equipment and the space needed for EVA-related activities, the Voskhod 3KD would only carry two cosmonauts instead of the three flown on first manned Voskhod 3KV flight. The Vykhod mission was officially approved by the Soviet government along with the three-man Voskhod mission on April 13, 1964. The construction of up to five 3KD spacecraft was authorized to support EVA missions.

Development of the new airlock for the Voskhod 3KD, called “Volga”, was started by mid-1964 by a team led by Chief Designer Boris Mikhailov at Engineering Plant 918 in Tomilino located just outside of Moscow to the southeast. Developed and built in just nine months, the cylindrical Volga airlock was an inflatable structure with an outside diameter of 1.2 meters and a total length of 2.5 meters when fully deployed. The upper end of the structure consisted of a rigid ring with an inward opening hatch and an outside handrail for the cosmonaut to grasp. At the lower end was another rigid ring that mated the airlock to the side of the 3KD descent module over an inward opening hatch specifically redesigned for this mission.

The sides of the airlock consisted of inner and outer fabric walls with forty “aerobooms” between them that were inflated using compressed air contained in four spheres attached to the lower ring. During launch, the stowed Volga airlock was just 0.74 meters tall and was accommodated behind a blister on the side of a modified Voskhod launch shroud. Once in orbit, the airlock would be inflated in about seven minutes via a control panel inside the descent module. A duplicate panel inside the airlock allowed the cosmonaut to control the airlock systems during the EVA. The inside of the fully inflated Volga airlock had a diameter of about one meter and an internal volume of 2.5 cubic meters. After the EVA was completed and the cosmonaut was safely back inside the ship, the airlock would be jettisoned. A total of five fully-functional airlocks for ground testing and actual flight (plus mockups and training units) were delivered for the Vykhod EVA mission.

In order to perform the EVA, the cosmonauts on the Vykhod mission required spacesuits specifically engineered for the task. The “Berkut” (Russian for “Golden Eagle”) spacesuit used on this mission started with a Vostok IVA-type suit and added additional layers of material for thermal protection. Aluminum interfaces were included to connect to life support and communications as well as a 5.35-meter umbilical line that would keep the cosmonaut tethered to the spacecraft during the EVA. Redesigned gloves along with a new white metal helmet with a hinged visor and reflective sunshade rounded out the new suit for the mission.

Life support during the EVA was provided by a backpack which included a 45-minute oxygen supply. About 80 minutes of backup life support was provided by equipment included with the Volga airlock. Because the suit would balloon and become too rigid to move in during the EVA when pressurized to one atmosphere like the Voskhod cabin interior, provisions were made to operate the suit at a reduced pressure of 0.4 or 0.27 atmospheres to improve mobility. Since the cosmonaut would only briefly be exposed to these reduced pressures minimizing the chances of nitrogen bubbles forming in his blood stream (a condition known as the bends), no attempt was made to pre-breath pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from the cosmonaut’s system before the EVA as is typically done today by astronauts who breath oxygen-nitrogen gas mixtures in their spacecraft.

Both cosmonauts would wear the new Berkut spacesuits during the Vykhod mission. While in theory the cosmonaut inside the descent module could rescue the EVA cosmonaut in case of a problem, in reality this was not likely to be a practical option. At very least, the pressure suits offered the cosmonauts protection against accidental depressurization of the cabin during the flight – an option that was not available to the three-man Voskhod 1 crew.

Preparations

Development of the hardware for the Vykhod EVA mission proceeded in parallel with the 3-man Voskhod 3KV mission. A group of six cosmonauts were chosen for the mission in April 1964 and they began formal training for the Vykhod mission that July. The command pilot was 39-year old Maj. Pavel Belyayev who joined the cosmonaut team in 1960 as its eldest member. His backup was Sr. Lt. Viktor Gorbatko with Sr. Lt. Dmitri Zaikin serving the support role. The pilot who would make the actual EVA was 30-year old Lt. Alexei Leonov who also joined the cosmonaut corps in 1960. Leonov’s backup was Sr. Lt. Yevgeny Khrunov with Sr. Engineer-Lt. Pyotr Kolodin serving as support. Because of a bout of tonsillitis, Gorbatko was removed from the team in January 1965 with Zaikin moving up to serve as backup command pilot. Khrunov eventually cross-trained to serve as a backup to Belyayev as well.

After the successful one-day mission of Voskhod 1 launched on October 12, 1964 (see “The Mission of Voskhod 1”), all effort focused on the upcoming Voskhod 2 flight which had been optimistically expected to launch in November. But the effort required to prepare for the mission made this impossible. By December it was planned to launch an unmanned test flight of the Voskhod 3KD in January or February 1965 for a rehearsal of the one-day manned mission now scheduled to fly in March or April. This schedule, made just as preparations for the final unmanned Gemini test flight were being completed (see “The Mission of Gemini 2”), would allow Voskhod 2 to beat NASA’s first Gemini EVA mission.

After additional delays and the resolution of last minute schedule conflicts with an E-6 Luna launch window in mid-March (see “The Mission of Luna 5“), the unmanned spacecraft 3KD number 1 lifted off from LC31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan at 10:41 Moscow Time on February 22, 1965. The 5,500-kilogram spacecraft was successfully placed into a 175 by 512-kilometer orbit inclined 64.8° to the equator by 11A57 serial number R15000-03 and was officially designated Kosmos 57 by Soviet authorities. Once in orbit, a Berkut spacesuit on board the spacecraft was inflated as part of a test and the Volga airlock was remotely deployed. After television images returned to ground controllers verified that the tests of the new airlock were successfully completed, it was jettisoned upon ground command clearing the way for the rest of the one-day mission. Plans to launch the manned Voskhod 2 mission on March 4 or 5 seemed to be on track.

All appeared to be going well with Kosmos 57 until the beginning of the third orbit about three hours into the mission when all contact with Soviet ground stations was suddenly lost. It was quickly determined that the destruct charges had been accidentally detonated destroying the orbiting spacecraft. A total of 168 pieces of debris were tracked where Kosmos 57 had been which decayed from orbit between March 31 and April 6, 1965. An immediate investigation into the failure of this vital test flight revealed that duplicate commands transmitted simultaneously by two different Soviet tracking stations had been inadvertently interpreted by the onboard control system of Kosmos 57 as a command to activate the TDU-1 retrorocket. Since the spacecraft was not properly oriented for this burn, Kosmos 57 remained in orbit. The automated control system on the spacecraft took this as a retrorocket failure and activated the self destruct package to keep the wayward spacecraft out of Western hands.

While such a failure mode was impossible on the upcoming manned Voskhod 2 mission since it did not carry an auto destruct system and could use its backup retrorocket to deorbit in the unlikely event of another premature activation of the TDU-1 engine, measures were taken to prevent a recurrence of this accident on future missions of Vostok-based spacecraft like Voskhod as well as Zenit-series reconnaissance satellites. In the mean time, the loss of Kosmos 57 prevented verifying the effect the Volga airlock mating ring would have on the rotation rate of the descent module during reentry. To obtain this information quickly, a mating ring was attached to the descent module of a Zenit-4 reconnaissance satellite which, like the Voskhod 3KD, was based on the Vostok 3KA design with a very similar descent module. The modified Zenit-4 was launched from LC31 on March 7, 1965 on 11A57 serial number R15001-05 into a 205 by 321-kilometer orbit to become Kosmos 59. After the descent module was successfully recovered at the end of its eight-day intelligence mission, data indicated that the rotation rate during reentry was as expected finally clearing the way for the manned flight of Voskhod 2.

The First EVA

As final preparations for the launch of Voskhod 2 were underway, Belyayev and Leonov arrived at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on March 9, 1965. After a review of the preparations and the results from the successful reentry test during the Kosmos 59 mission, on March 16 the State Commission officially set March 18 as the launch date – five days before the scheduled launch of the first manned Gemini flight which was planned to make a three-orbit test fight. The plan for the Voskhod 2 mission was to start preparations for the EVA once in orbit with the spacewalk itself to occur during the second orbit while the spacecraft overflew Soviet territory. Voskhod 2 would return to Earth after one day in orbit like its predecessor. If the ten-minute EVA could not be performed for whatever reason, Voskhod 2 would fly an alternate flight plan that would keep the cosmonauts in orbit for two or three days setting a new multi-man spaceflight endurance record.

The morning of launch saw snow flurries and a cold wind blowing across the steppes where the Cosmodrome was located. The lack of abort options during the early part of ascent and attempting the first EVA combined to produce an atmosphere filled with anxiety in the control center. Finally, the launch of 3KD number 4 with Belyayev and Leonov aboard took place from Site 1 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 10:00 Moscow Time on March 18, 1965. The 11A57 launch vehicle serial number R15000-05 operated almost flawlessly to place the 5,682-kilogram Voskhod 2 into 173.5 by 497.7-kilometer orbit inclined 64.8° to the equator. As Voskhod 2 coasted towards the apogee of its first orbit to set a new human altitude record, the two cosmonauts began preparing for the EVA.

After successfully deploying the Volga airlock, Belyayev assisted Leonov in donning his life support backpack in the cramped confines of Voskhod’s cabin. As Voskhod 2 was nearing the end of its first orbit, Leonov opened the airlock hatch and floated inside attaching his umbilical line in preparation for the EVA. Belyayev wished Leonov good luck, sealed the hatch behind his comrade and returned to his couch to monitor the spacecraft and events outside via radio and television as Leonov began depressurizing the airlock.

At 11:32:54 Moscow Time, Leonov opened the airlock’s outer hatch. As Leonov would later describe, at 11:34:51 he “gave a little push and popped out of the hatch like a cork”. After his eyes became adjusted to the bright sunlit scene, he could see everything from the Straits of Gibraltar across the Mediterranean Sea to the Caspian Sea. Leonov’s only tasks during his EVA were to attach a movie camera to the outside of the airlock to record his activities and take photographs of the Voskhod spacecraft. While he was able to attach the movie camera, Leonov’s spacesuit proved too rigid for him to bend his arms enough to reach the shutter release of the camera mounted on his chest despite his great physical strength and training. As a result, he could take no photographs. Only movie footage and recordings of ghostly images from a television camera mounted on the exterior of Voskhod 2 documented Leonov’s historic EVA as he floated outside of his ship.

As Voskhod 2 approached the Soviet Pacific coast, Leonov began preparations to return inside of the airlock on Belyayev’s orders. With great difficulty, he was able to get the movie camera back inside but discovered his spacesuit had ballooned to the point where he could no longer fit back through the hatch. Sweating profusely as he struggled to reenter the airlock with the visor of his helmet fogging up, Leonov finally decided to reduce the pressure in his suit from 0.4 atmospheres down to 0.3. When that did not help, he risked the bends by lowering the pressure beyond the safety limit of 0.27 atmospheres down to just 0.25. He was finally able to squeeze back into the airlock and close the outer hatch.

With sweat literally sloshing inside his spacesuit, Leonov reentered the main cabin after the airlock had been repressurized. Leonov had spent 23 minutes and 41 seconds in the vacuum of space with 12 minutes 9 seconds actually outside of the spacecraft. While the world press heralded the news of the first spacewalk and the commanding lead the Soviet Union had over the United States which was days away from launching its first Gemini mission, it would be a decade before the world would learn of Leonov’s EVA difficulties. American astronauts would encounter similar issues as they struggled to perform tasks during some of the earliest EVAs of the Gemini program. It would take months before proper techniques and equipment would be developed so that useful work could be performed during an EVA without dangerously exhausting the astronaut.

The end of the EVA did not end the problems for the crew of Voskhod 2, however. The descent module’s hatch never resealed properly after the EVA creating a slow leak. The craft’s environmental system sensed this and compensated by flooding the cabin with oxygen. While this helped to maintain pressure, it also sharply increased the risk of fire – a lesson the Soviets had learned the hard way during an accident on the ground as did their American counterparts years later during the Apollo 1 fire (see “The Future That Never Came: The Unflown Mission of Apollo 1“). Decreasing the cabin temperature decreased the humidity which apparently helped to stabilize the situation. With the difficulties of the EVA now behind them, Belyayev and Leonov set about their duties for the balance of their one-day flight. In addition to Leonov recording his experiences while they were fresh in his mind, they performed a variety of medical and engineering experiments, ate and got some well deserved rest.

The Return of Voskhod 2

On the morning of March 19, Belyayev and Leonov were busy preparing for their return to Earth. But just as the TDU-1 engine was suppose to fire near the end of the 16th orbit, a signal indicated that the automatic guidance system had malfunctioned and the spacecraft was not properly oriented for return to Earth. The firing of the TDU-1 was aborted and Belyayev was instructed to manually orient Voskhod 2 and fire the TDU-1 engine on the 18th or 22nd orbit to attempt a return. This delay meant that they would miss the primary landing zone on the flat steppes of Kazakhstan.

Unfortunately, with the less-than-ideal placement of the control panel and Vzor porthole in the Voskhod, it proved very difficult for cosmonauts in spacesuits to position themselves to align the spacecraft manually and fire the retrorocket. With help from Leonov, Belyayev had to lie across the couches to verify the alignment of the spacecraft using Vzor. It then took a longer than expected 46 seconds for Belyayev to return to his seat so that he could manually fire the TDU-1 retrorocket at 11:36:27 Moscow Time. As a result of the extra time to get back into position, Voskhod 2 fired its engine late and came down 2,000 kilometers farther downrange than planned.

After firing the TDU-1 engine, the separation of the descent module from the rest of the spacecraft components and reentry proceeded normally. At an altitude of five kilometers, the parachute system was activated. About six minutes later at 12:02:17, Voskhod 2 safely landed in a heavily wooded area covered in deep snow about 180 kilometers from the town of Perm in Siberia after a flight of 26 hours and 2 minutes. While the cosmonauts were able to signal that they were alright, it would be four hours before their capsule was spotted by rescue crews. With no nearby clearing in the forest available to land a helicopter, the two cosmonauts would have to spend an uncomfortable, cold night in their capsule before they could be reached by rescuers who came in on cross-country skis. Belyayev and Leonov finally returned to the Cosmodrome for their formal debriefings two days after landing.

With the crew of Voskhod 2 safely back home, the Soviet Union had successfully completed yet another stunning mission before the first manned Gemini had even left the launch pad. While Soviet authorities made good use of the propaganda value of the Voskhod 2 mission, Korolev was busy planning additional Voskhod missions that would include long duration flights up to 15 days in length and additional EVAs in an effort to stay ahead of NASA’s Gemini missions. As it turned out, Voskhod 2 would prove to be the last mission of this short-lived series. Follow-up missions were postponed over the coming months and, by late 1966, cancelled entirely as the Voskhod missions were deemed to be too risky and to allow limited resources at OKB-1 to be focused on the development of the Soyuz 7K spacecraft. In the mean time, the stage was now set for NASA’s Gemini program to get off the ground and allow the United States to catch up in the race to the Moon.

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Related Video

Here is a brief Russian video with color archival footage of Alexei Leonov’s famous EVA.

Related Reading

“The Mission of Voskhod 1”, Drew Ex Machina, October 12, 2014 [Post]

“Vostok’s Legacy”, Drew Ex Machina, April 12, 2015 [Post]

General References

Boris Chertok, Rockets and People Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War, SP-2009-4110, NASA, 2009

Rex Hall and David J. Shayler, The Rocket Men, Vostok & Voskhod, The First Soviet Manned Spaceflights, Springer-Praxis, 2001

Dietrich Haeseler, “Leonov’s Way to Space: Airlock of Voskhod-2”, Spaceflight, Vol. 36, No. 8, pp. 280-282, August 1994

Nicholas L. Johnson, Handbook of Soviet Manned Space Flight, Univelt, 1980