Alexei Leonov

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was born on the 30th of May 1934 in Listvyanka, a small settlement in West Siberian Krai, and he died in Moscow on the 11th of October 2019. In the eight decades between those two dates, he accomplished something no human being had ever done: he stepped outside a spacecraft in the vacuum of space and floated free. But that moment on the 18th of March 1965 very nearly killed him, and the story of how he survived it reveals a man who spent his entire life navigating between the extraordinary and the precarious. How does a boy from Siberia, the eighth of nine children of a miner and an electrician, end up sketching orbital sunrises from outside the Earth's atmosphere? Why was Leonov repeatedly chosen for the most dangerous missions in the Soviet space programme, only to have them cancelled one after another? And what did it mean for the Cold War when he shook hands with an American commander two hundred kilometres above the planet? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Siberian Beginning

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  Leonov's grandfather had already been forced to relocate to Siberia once, as punishment for participating in the 1905 Russian Revolution, and the family's relationship with state power remained fraught. In 1936, when Alexei was two years old, his father Arkhip was arrested and declared an enemy of the people. Leonov later wrote in his autobiography: "He was not alone: many were being arrested. It was part of a conscientious drive by the authorities to eradicate anyone who showed too much independence or strength of character. These were the years of Stalin's purges. Many disappeared into remote gulags and were never seen again."

  The family moved in with a married sister in Kemerovo. Arkhip Leonov was eventually released and compensated for his wrongful imprisonment, rejoining the family there. Young Alexei turned to art early, first drawing flowers on ovens, then painting landscapes on canvas. Art was not purely an aesthetic pursuit: it helped provide food for the family.

  In 1948, when Soviet authorities encouraged citizens to settle in newly occupied former Prussian territory, the Leonovs moved again, this time to Kaliningrad. Leonov finished secondary school there in 1953. He applied to the Academy of Arts in Riga, Latvia, but the tuition was too expensive. He chose instead to enroll in a Ukrainian preparatory flying school in Kremenchug, making his first solo flight in May 1955. He managed to pursue both interests simultaneously, studying art part-time in Riga while completing an advanced fighter-pilot course at the Chuguev Higher Air Force Pilots School in the Ukrainian SSR. On the 30th of October 1957, he graduated with an honours degree and was commissioned a lieutenant in the 113th Parachute Aviation Regiment.

• 3. Twelve Minutes Outside

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  Out of roughly 20 Soviet Air Forces pilots selected for the first cosmonaut training group in 1960, Leonov was the one who would go outside the capsule first. The original plan had placed the spacewalk on the Voskhod 1 mission, but that flight was cancelled, shifting the event to Voskhod 2. On the 18th of March 1965, tethered to the spacecraft by a 4.8-metre line, Leonov floated in open space for 12 minutes and 9 seconds.

  What the official record did not initially emphasise was how close the mission came to ending in catastrophe. In the vacuum of space, Leonov's suit inflated so severely that he could no longer fit through the airlock to return to the capsule. He had to manually open a valve to bleed off suit pressure, a procedure not in the original plan, before he could squeeze back inside. Eighteen months of weightlessness training had prepared him for the disorientation of space; nothing had fully prepared him for the possibility of being locked outside.

  During the mission, Leonov drew a small sketch of an orbital sunrise. It was the first work of art made in outer space. The sketch was not a symbolic gesture performed for cameras: it was the act of a man who had been drawing since childhood, now doing what came naturally in the most unnatural environment a human being had ever entered. That sketch would attract attention from an unexpected quarter a few years later, when a celebrated science fiction author noticed something striking about the image.

• 4. Missions That Never Flew

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  After Voskhod 2, Leonov spent years being selected for major missions that were subsequently cancelled or reassigned, a pattern that says as much about the turbulent state of the Soviet space programme as it does about the man himself. In 1968, he was chosen to command a circumlunar Soyuz 7K-L1 flight. That mission was cancelled because of delays in achieving a reliable circumlunar capability and because the American Apollo 8 crew had already completed a lunar orbit, moving the goalposts of the Space Race.

  Leonov was also selected to be the first Soviet person to land on the Moon, aboard the LOK/N1 spacecraft. Part of the reason for choosing him was that the mission design required a spacewalk between two lunar vehicles, a task he had already demonstrated in 1965. That project was cancelled too.

  He was slated to command the 1971 Soyuz 11 mission to Salyut 1, the first crewed space station. His crew was replaced with a backup after fellow cosmonaut Valery Kubasov was suspected of having contracted tuberculosis, along with crew member Pyotr Kolodin. The replacement crew flew the mission and died when their capsule depressurised during re-entry. Leonov was then assigned to command the next Salyut 1 mission, but the station was lost before that flight could happen. Two further Salyut stations were lost at launch or failed shortly after. By the time Salyut 4 reached orbit successfully, Leonov had been reassigned to a project that would prove far more consequential than any of the cancelled lunar flights.

• 5. The Apollo-Soyuz Handshake

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  In July 1975, Leonov commanded Soyuz 19 as the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint space mission between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two vehicles docked in orbit and remained linked for two days. The American commander was Thomas P. Stafford, and the relationship that formed between the two men outlasted the Cold War by decades. Leonov became the godfather of Stafford's younger children. When Leonov died in October 2019, Stafford delivered a eulogy in Russian at the funeral.

  The mission earned Leonov his second Hero of the Soviet Union award on the 22nd of July 1975, matching the first he had received on the 23rd of March 1965. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale awarded him the Gold Space Medal in 1976 for the Apollo-Soyuz mission; the FAI created a special exception to its usual rules so that Stafford could receive the same award in the same year, since it was normally restricted to one recipient annually.

  From 1976 to 1982, Leonov served as commander of the cosmonaut team and deputy director of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. He also edited the cosmonaut newsletter Neptune. During the mission he had taken coloured pencils and paper into space, and he drew portraits of the Apollo astronauts who flew alongside him. The sketches were a continuation of work he had begun during his first flight a decade earlier, and they positioned him as an unlikely bridge between two nations whose space programmes had spent years treating each other as adversaries.

• 6. Art, Science Fiction, and Arthur C. Clarke

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  Clarke dedicated his 1982 novel 2010: Odyssey Two to Leonov and Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov. The connection between the two men traced back to a 1968 screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Leonov told Clarke that the alignment of the Moon, Earth, and Sun in the film's opening was essentially identical to the arrangement he had painted in his 1967 work Near the Moon, though the diagonal framing of the painting was not replicated on screen. After the screening, Leonov made an autographed sketch of the painting and gave it to Clarke, who kept it hanging on his office wall. Clarke named the fictional spaceship in 2010 the Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov.

  Leonov's published books included albums of his artistic works and collaborations with his friend Andrei Sokolov. He received honorary membership of the Russian Academy of Arts. In 2011, alongside astrophysicist Garik Israelyan, Queen guitarist Brian May, and scientist-educator Stephen Hawking, Leonov co-founded the Starmus international festival of science, space, and music. He designed the Stephen Hawking Medal awarded by the festival, depicting a portrait of Hawking on the front. The reverse shows Leonov's first spacewalk and Brian May's guitar. Leonov designed the reverse side in close cooperation with May.

  In 2004, Leonov and former American astronaut David Scott began collaborating on a dual memoir about the Space Race. Published in 2006 under the title Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race, it carried introductions by Neil Armstrong and Tom Hanks. John Green later wrote an essay titled "Orbital Sunrise" focusing partly on the sketch Leonov made during his 1965 mission; it was released on the 26th of August 2021 as part of Green's podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed.

• 7. Legacy on Earth and Beyond

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  Leonov died on the 11th of October 2019 in Moscow after a long illness, aged 85. His funeral was held on the 15th of October. He was the last surviving member of the five cosmonauts who had flown in the Voskhod programme. He was survived by his wife Svetlana Dozenko, their daughter Oksana, and two grandchildren; their other daughter, Viktoria, had died in 1996.

  The physical traces of Leonov's career are scattered across some improbable locations. A crater near Mare Moscoviense on the far side of the Moon was named after him in 1970. An asteroid first observed in 1981 was designated 9533 Aleksejleonov. In 1966, a school for young cosmonauts bearing his name opened in the town of Balashov in the Saratov region. The TP-82 survival pistol carried by cosmonauts from 1986 to 2007 exists in part because of Leonov: after landing, he had worried about bears and wolves while waiting for his pick-up crew, and the experience helped inspire the weapon's development.

  Together with Rusty Schweickart, Leonov established the Association of Space Explorers in 1985; membership is open to anyone who has orbited the Earth. The 2017 Russian film The Age of Pioneers, based on his account of the Voskhod 2 mission and featuring Yevgeny Mironov as Leonov, was one he actively shaped as a technical adviser. He insisted the director cut approximately 40 minutes of footage featuring Yuri Gagarin so that the film could focus on the spacewalk. The last interview Leonov gave formed the basis for the documentary Space Inside, which premiered at the 2022 Starmus festival in Armenia and was introduced by his daughter Oksana Leonova.