Voskhod 2

• 1. Introduction

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  Voskhod 2 launched at 07:00 GMT on the 18th of March 1965, carrying two Soviet cosmonauts into orbit on a mission that had never been attempted before. Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov were about to find out whether a human being could survive outside the protection of a spacecraft. The answer, as history would record, was yes. But the path between that launch and that answer was so riddled with near-disasters that the official Soviet news agency's cheerful announcement afterward was almost the opposite of the truth. What the public was told, and what actually happened to Leonov in space, were two very different things. And then the spacecraft came home to the wrong place entirely, dropping the two men into freezing Ural forest where wolves and bears were in mating season, the temperature would fall to -30 degrees Celsius, and no helicopter could reach them.

• 2. The Volga Airlock

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  Belyayev deployed and pressurised the Volga inflatable airlock after reaching orbit, and the engineering behind that structure was its own remarkable story. The Volga was designed, built, and tested in just nine months in mid-1964. At launch it folded over the hatch of Voskhod 2, extending only 74 centimeters beyond the spacecraft's hull. Once deployed, it formed a tube 2.5 meters long with a 1.2-meter-wide metal ring at each end, and an internal volume of 2.50 cubic meters.

  The fabric tube was made rigid by about 40 airbooms clustered into three independent groups, needing seven minutes to fully inflate. The reason for this elaborate structure had nothing to do with timidity. The capsule's avionics used vacuum tubes, which required a constant atmosphere to stay cool. Without the airlock, opening the hatch to space would have destroyed the electronics. The American Gemini capsule used solid-state avionics and a single-gas oxygen atmosphere, so it could be depressurised and replenished after an EVA relatively easily. Voskhod 2 could not.

  Three 16mm cameras recorded the spacewalk: two inside the airlock, and one mounted on a boom on the upper ring outside. Leonov's first task after leaving the airlock was to attach that exterior camera himself, which he did without difficulty. The Volga also carried a set of backup controls for Leonov suspended on bungee cords inside, giving him some independence from Belyayev if something went wrong.

• 3. Twelve Minutes Outside

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  At 08:34:51 GMT on the 18th of March 1965, Alexei Leonov pushed out through Volga's outer hatch to the end of his 5.35-meter umbilicus. He later said the tether gave him tight control of his movements. He reported looking down and seeing from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea all at once.

  Leonov's spacewalk began over north-central Africa, in the region of northern Sudan and southern Egypt. It ended over eastern Siberia, 12 minutes and 9 seconds later. Those minutes were not the triumphant float they appeared to be in official photographs. His Berkut spacesuit ballooned in the vacuum, stiffening until he could not reach the shutter switch on his thigh for the chest-mounted camera. He could not photograph the spacecraft as planned.

  When the 12 minutes were up, Leonov found he could not re-enter the airlock. The suit had expanded too much for him to fit. Later accounts confirm that he violated procedure by entering head-first rather than feet-first, then became stuck sideways when he turned to close the outer hatch. To free himself he bled off suit pressure below the established safety limits, risking decompression sickness. He did not report any of this on the radio. Doctors later measured the cost: his core body temperature had risen by 1.8 degrees Celsius in 20 minutes, and he described himself as being up to his knees in sweat inside the suit. He also carried a suicide pill in case Belyayev had been forced to abandon him in orbit.

• 4. What TASS Did Not Report

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  The government news agency TASS announced that Leonov felt well outside the ship and after returning. Soviet state radio and television had already cut their live broadcasts from the spacecraft before that announcement was made, at the moment the mission experienced its difficulties. Post-Cold War Russian documents confirmed that the TASS statement described a fiction.

  Sergei Korolev, Chief Designer at OKB-1 Design Bureau, stated after the EVA that Leonov could have remained outside for much longer than he did. Mstislav Keldysh, the chief theoretician of the Soviet space program and President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, said the spacewalk showed that future cosmonauts would find work in space easy. These were the public assessments of a mission that had just seen its primary participant nearly trapped in space and nearly dead from heat exhaustion.

  In a 1980 interview published in the Soviet Military Review, Leonov himself downplayed the difficulties, saying that exploring the universe is inseparably linked with activity in open space and that there is no end of work in that field. The gap between public statement and private reality was a defining feature of how Voskhod 2 was presented to the world.

• 5. Wrong Planet, Wrong Forest

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  The troubles did not end when Leonov was back inside. After Belyayev fired pyrotechnic bolts to discard the Volga airlock, the two cosmonauts discovered that the hatch was difficult to seal properly because of thermal distortion caused by Leonov's lengthy return. Then the automatic landing system failed. The orbital module also failed to disconnect cleanly from the landing module, not unlike what had happened with Vostok 1, causing the spherical return vehicle to spin wildly until the two modules finally separated at 100 kilometers altitude.

  Both cosmonauts were wearing spacesuits in an extremely cramped cabin. They could not return to their seats to restore the ship's center of mass until 46 seconds after orienting the ship for reentry. That 46-second delay was enough to move the landing point by 386 kilometers. Instead of the intended site, Voskhod 2 came down in the forests of the Upper Kama Upland, somewhere west of Solikamsk, in the Perm region.

  General Nikolai Kamanin's diary recorded the exact landing location, about 75 kilometers from Perm in the Ural mountains, at 09:02 GMT on the 19th of March 1965. A commander of one of the search helicopters later reported: "On the forest road between the villages of Sorokovaya and Shchuchino, about 30 kilometers southwest of the town of Berezniki, I see the red parachute and the two cosmonauts. There is deep snow all around." Flight controllers had no idea where the spacecraft had landed for hours after touchdown. The families of Leonov and Belyayev were told the men were resting after recovery, which was not yet true.

• 6. Three Days in the Taiga

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  Approximately four hours after touchdown a helicopter spotted the capsule and crew, but the forest was too dense for any helicopter to land. The aviation marshal Rudenko decided that recovering the men by rope and ladder was too dangerous. Leonov and Belyayev spent three days and two nights in the forest before they were reached.

  Both men had relevant experience for the situation. Belyayev had grown up in Chelishchevo with the dream of becoming a hunter. Leonov had spent time alone in wilderness as an artistic pursuit. The spacecraft's survival kit included a knife and a pistol. The presence of bears and wolves, made aggressive by mating season, made the situation more serious. At night the temperature dropped to -30 degrees Celsius, and the spacecraft's hatch had been blown open by its own explosive bolts, so the men sheltered in or near the capsule, which the crew called Sharik in Russian. The electrical system had completely failed, meaning no heater, though the fans ran at full blast throughout.

  Helicopters dropped warm clothes, boots, water, cheese, sausage, and bread. Doctors and technicians were also dropped nearby to trek in on foot. A rescue party arrived on skis the next day, chopped wood, and built a small log cabin and a large fire. After a second night that was somewhat more comfortable than the first, Leonov and Belyayev skied 9 kilometers to a waiting helicopter with the help of rescuers, then flew to Perm and then to Baikonur for their debriefing. The incident directly drove the later development of the TP-82 Cosmonaut survival pistol, a dedicated weapon designed for exactly the conditions the two men had just survived.