The first walk among the stars that almost ended badly

BarcelonaWhen Alexei Leonov looked back on his life, he realised how the world had changed in 75 years. He was born in a wooden house in Siberia, and as a child he would look up in fascination as a Tupolev plane flew gracefully overhead. It still seemed like a miracle to see a man fly. Little did Aleksei expect that he would be the first man to perform a spacewalk.

On 18 March 1965, 500 kilometres above the Earth, Leonov stepped out of his Voskhod spacecraft for 12 minutes and 9 seconds, connected to the craft by a cable just five metres long. He would recall that he felt like he was "a grain of sand" and was calm, although when he tested the movements he could make, he began to spin violently on his axis, a movement that was stopped by the cable that connected him to the craft. The Earth seemed to him to be full of colours, as if it were a painter's palette. He could see the day breaking over the African continent. It was beautiful. Aleksei had actually taken a bunch of coloured pencils with him and made a drawing of the view he had on the ship. The first piece of space art, you might say. It made sense that he did this, because as a young man Leonov wanted to be an artist, but when he entered art school in Riga it was difficult, he had enrolled in a flight school in Kiev.

Sixty years ago, Leonov became a hero. He never wanted for anything again, and in the last years of his life Vladimir Putin offered him jobs and paraded him around schools explaining how he had conquered space. The old Soviet heroes were now heroes of the great mother Russia. Leonov already knew how things could change. He was born in Siberia, as his grandfather had been exiled there by the Tsar for having participated in the 1905 revolution. Despite being from a left-wing family, Aleksei's father was deported by Stalin to a gulag. Luckily, he came back alive. And the whole family left the Siberian forests for Kaliningrad when this city, German until 1945, was occupied by the Soviets. The young Leonov went from a rural environment to a grey city, dreaming of being a painter. But he ended up signing up for flight school, since it was more affordable and he found flying "exciting." He did so well that he was selected to be an astronaut.

He was another pawn in the great chess game between the Soviets and the Americans to conquer space. The United States reached the Moon first, but for a good part of the race it was behind the Soviets. They were the first to send a satellite, the famous Sputnik, in 1957, to make an animal orbit the Earth, the dog Laika, in the same 1957, to bring animals back alive from space, with the dogs Belka and Strelka in 1960 and, finally, in the first man. The first successful space walk, with the Voskhod 2 mission. For almost all his life, Leonov remained faithful to the Soviet triumphalist speeches, but during the 1990s, in an interview with the British BBC, he would admit for the first time that, obsessed with defeating the Americans, the Soviet space program was going to commit. His own mission, in fact, almost ended badly.

Leonov would recall that half in jest, half out of superstition, he emulated everything Gagarin had done in 1961 before his flight: a champagne toast, leaving the rest of the bottle waiting for the return and urinating against the wheels of the bus that took him off until he took it to Bakon. You had to urinate beforehand, because in the small capsule, if you wanted to, you had to do it on yourself. Inside Voskhov there was room for two people, Aleksei and Pavel Belyayev. Pavel was in charge of the cockpit control panel where Leonov, already dressed as necessary, entered waiting for him to be able to open the hatch with the outside once the pressure was zero.

Outside, everything went well. In fact, he would have preferred to stay outside enjoying the experience, but the orders were that he had to return in 10 minutes. He quickly understood why: his suit was fragile. The lack of atmospheric pressure had caused him to "be deformed, my hands had come out of my gloves, my boots had come off my feet. My dress felt loose around my body. I had to do something. With the dress in that state, I couldn't get in through the hatch," he recalled. So he decided to expel the air from his suit through a valve, risking running out of oxygen himself. "I started to feel a tingling in my legs and hands. I was entering a dangerous phase of decompression and I knew it could be fatal," he explained. Aleksei returned to the capsule as best he could. In fact, he did not do it as he should have, since the protocol was to enter feet first and he entered headfirst, which would force him to make violent movements to be able to get the whole cable in and close the hatch. He felt bad. When he returned to Earth, he discovered that he had lost six kilos from sweating so much because of the change in body temperature with the decompression.

The return was complicated. He was yellow and the automatic system for activating the reverse propulsion engines failed. Pavel Belyayev activated them manually, something he had never done before, since, being faster than the Americans, they had not received all the necessary training. Fortunately, Pavel maintained the correct angle of entry to Earth to avoid a too violent descent. In the end, they fell into a forest in Siberia, Aleksei's homeland. The problem was that they fell into a remote area full of wolves and bears, far from any town and with an outside temperature of -25 degrees. Both stayed inside waiting for the rescue team to arrive, which, following the trajectory, took about 9 hours to arrive. They had a hard time finding a place to land the helicopter and then, on skis, they reached the two astronauts.

Alexei would become a hero and remain linked to the Soviet space program, returning to space in 1975 when he led the famous Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first joint mission between the Americans and the Soviets: The two ships were joined in space and Thomas and... for life. So much so that Leonov was the godfather of Stafford's son and the American would be at the Russian's funeral in 2019. A friendship that had begun in space. There where Aleksei, 60 years ago, had looked at the Earth with the eyes of a painter.