Apollo astronaut David Scott, Leonov recounts the spacewalk and its even more dramatic aftermath. In his recently published book, Two Sides of the Moon, written with U.S. Even less well known was how close Leonov and his crewmate, Pavel (Pasha) Belyayev, came to dying that day. Floating outside his tiny Voskhod 2 capsule for 10 exhilarating minutes, Leonov felt, he writes, “like a seagull with its wings outstretched, soaring high above the Earth.” In keeping with the secrecy of the Soviet space program, few people-not even his family-knew about the spacewalk ahead of time. In March 1965, at the age of 30, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk in history, beating out American rival Ed White on Gemini 4 by almost three months.
