Launch of Voskhod 2

Voskhod 2 was a Soviet crewed spacecraft carrying Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov, during which Leonov made the first spacewalk in history, in March 1965. He left the cabin through an inflatable airlock and floated outside for about twelve minutes, tethered to the craft. His suit swelled in the vacuum, and he had to release air to bend enough to get back through the hatch, head first and then turned around inside the airlock. A failure of the automatic orientation system forced the crew to land by hand, and they came down in the snowy forest of the Urals, far from the planned site, where they spent a night waiting for rescue. The flight beat American efforts to a spacewalk by a few months.

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