12 Minutes
At The Edge
Of Everything
High above the Soviet Union, the airlock of Voskhod 2 depressurized. Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov floated out into the unforgiving vacuum of low Earth orbit, attached to his spacecraft by a single 5.35-meter umbilical cord.
Below him, the vibrant curve of the Earth; around him, the deafening silence of the cosmos. For the first time in human history, a person stepped off the ship and into the void.
Credit: Sergeev L.V. / CC BY-SA 3.0
Credit: Sergeev L.V. / CC BY-SA 3.0
CRITICAL EXPANSION
The sensation of weightlessness was absolute, but space is actively hostile. In the vacuum of orbit, the physical realities of pressure differentials took over. Leonov's Berkut spacesuit began to balloon, expanding violently against the lack of exterior resistance.
His fingers pulled away from the interior gloves; his feet lifted out of his boots. He was trapped inside a rigid, pressurized shell, unable to bend his joints or reach his camera. Most critically, the swollen suit was now too large to fit back into the narrow airlock of Voskhod 2.
THE BLEED
Facing a terrifying calculus, Leonov realized that to bend his limbs enough to enter the airlock, he had to manually bleed oxygen from his suit. In doing so, he risked decompression sickness and oxygen starvation while still floating in the abyss.
In the absolute silence of space, he opened the pressure valve. As the internal atmosphere dropped, the rigid canvas softened just enough. Exhausted, drenched in sweat, and pushing his physical limits, he clawed his way backward into the airlock. The hatch sealed. The tether was unhooked. The world had irrevocably changed.
Credit: NASA / Stephanie Stoll / Public domain