Soviet Cosmonaut Bleeds Oxygen to Survive First Spacewalk Crisis
Finn's Take· TL;DR- Leonov vented his spacesuit's pressure to escape the airlock during the first spacewalk, risking decompression sickness but avoiding being trapped outside forever.
- Recently released documents reveal Leonov's dramatized accounts from decades later exaggerated the crisis details; contemporary records show he had planned the pressure venting.
- Voskhod 2's engineering failures and near-disaster directly drove spacesuit design improvements that made all subsequent spacewalks significantly safer for astronauts.
When Space Itself Became the Enemy
On March 18, 1965, Alexei Leonov stepped outside Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes and nine seconds, becoming the first human to walk in space . What should have been humanity's greatest triumph nearly became its most public disaster. In the vacuum of space, Leonov's Berkut suit stiffened and ballooned to the point where he could not re-enter the airlock .
Leonov later described his feet pulling away from his boots and his fingers from his gloves as the suit inflated like a grotesque balloon. The Soviet broadcast was cut while the crisis unfolded, resuming only once Leonov was safely back in the cabin . For those terrifying minutes, the world's first spacewalker faced a choice: bleed oxygen and risk unconsciousness, or remain trapped outside his spacecraft forever.
A Desperate Gamble in the Void
Leonov opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, making it flexible enough to get him back through the airlock . The National Air and Space Museum describes the venting as risky, with later accounts identifying the danger as loss of pressure margin and the possibility of decompression sickness . In his 2005 Smithsonian account, Leonov wrote that he decided not to tell mission control before opening the pressure valve because he believed he was the only person who could bring the situation under control .
The technical reality was unforgiving. Only nine months had passed between the technical specification for the airlock and spacesuit and Leonov's EVA . The Soviet hardware had been built quickly , and space was proving more hostile than engineers had anticipated.
The Story Behind the Story
For decades, Leonov's dramatic accounts dominated the narrative. Numerous books and articles cited his vivid descriptions of a desperate struggle, plunging into the airlock head-first instead of feet first, and performing a seemingly impossible flip inside the claustrophobic airlock tube . Except that's not how it happened, according to contemporary documents and video footage that became available over the past year .
In his own words written immediately after the mission but made public only recently, Leonov said he had planned to drop the suit pressure all along and confirmed he entered legs-first . The 2004 memoir version, written nearly forty years later, may have heightened a story that Soviet secrecy initially suppressed and that subsequent retellings sharpened .
Beyond the Headlines
Encyclopedia Astronautica summarizes the mission as a first spacewalk followed by cascading trouble: an oxygen-flooded cabin, manual re-entry, and an off-target landing . It took two days for ground teams to reach them on skis, with a rescue party having to cut down enough trees to clear a helicopter landing site .
The legacy extends beyond the drama. The engineering changes that came out of Voskhod 2, particularly to spacesuit design, fed directly into the suits used on later Soyuz missions . The first human spacewalk was not only a triumph of courage and engineering but also an immediate lesson in how badly a suit can fight the body inside it . Today's spacewalks, routine by comparison, owe their safety to lessons learned in those twelve harrowing minutes when humanity first stepped into the infinite.