Fwd: To Swim in Space: The World's First Spacewalk

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: March 9, 2014 11:21:44 PM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: To Swim in Space: The World's First Spacewalk

 

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
March 8th, 2014 

 

To Swim in Space: The World's First Spacewalk (Part 1)

By Ben Evans

 

Forty-nine years ago this month, Alexei Leonov became the first human to see the Earth, unhindered by the confines of a spacecraft, as God or another space traveller might see it. The experience almost cost him his life. Photo Credit: Roscosmos

From the moment he saw it, Alexei Leonov was captivated. He and a dozen other cosmonauts were touring the OKB-1 design bureau, near Moscow, with Chief Designer Sergei Korolev. Unlike the spherical Vostok capsules on the production line, one craft in particular was quite distinct; it possessed a long, cylindrical airlock, with a movie camera jutting out to one side. Korolev explained that sailors had to know how to swim and, by extension, cosmonauts should learn to "swim" in space. Shortly afterward, Leonov found himself in a space suit, practicing how to squeeze in and out of the airlock. When he had finished, someone clapped him on the back. It was his close friend, Yuri Gagarin. In a whisper, Gagarin told him that Korolev had just selected Leonov to perform the world's first "spacewalk."

Properly termed Extravehicular Activity (EVA), the spacewalk was nothing more than a cynical attempt by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to outdo the Americans, whose forthcoming Project Gemini would involve astronauts working outside their craft. In October 1964, plans accelerated for a two-man mission called "Vykhod" ("Exit"), during which Leonov would venture into the vacuum of space for 10-15 minutes. His crewmate, Pavel Belyayev, would remain inside, controlling the airlock. Unlike Gemini, whose hardened electronics could withstand the depressurization of the whole cabin, Vykhod's avionics were more primitive and posed a greater risk of overheating. Consequently, Korolev opted for a separate airlock and his designers considered a variety of rigid and flexible designs (including a rolled-up spiral), before settling on a 36-boom cylinder which could maintain its shape, even in the event of a catastrophic pressure loss.

A metal ring would fit over Vykhod's inward-opening hatch to provide access to the airlock, and a set of external oxygen tanks would automatically inflate and pressurize the chamber in just 7 minutes. Leonov and his backup, Yevgeni Khrunov, trained for the EVA aboard a Tupolev Tu-104 aircraft, which flew them on more than 200 parabolic arcs to simulate weightlessness for periods of around 30 seconds at a time. On the ground, they swam and lifted weights to build their upper body muscles. Elsewhere, the airlock was tested at pressure conditions equivalent to extreme altitude, and in February 1965—to avoid giving away its true nature—Vykhod was renamed "Voskhod-2." Before committing Belyayev and Leonov to the daring mission, however, Korolev needed to run a fully automated test in Earth orbit. Late in February, Cosmos 57 roared into space, carrying a simulated airlock … and inadvertently blew itself up!

From the moment he saw it, Alexei Leonov was captivated by Voskhod-2 and its protruding airlock. Little did he know that he would be the first man to demonstrate it in space. Photo Credit: Roscosmos

Signals from the spacecraft, received by U.S. intelligence agencies, indicated that the airlock was successfully inflated and testing of the hatch was in progress, when a pair of ground stations mistakenly issued simultaneous commands. The two commands confused the spacecraft, which interpreted them as an instruction to commence re-entry, whereupon the retrorockets misfired and an on-board destruct system—designed to keep it from falling into enemy hands—was remotely triggered. Although the airlock had worked, Korolev was anxious. He had only one other Voskhod spacecraft ready to fly and needed the reassurance of a fully successful automated mission. He approached Belyayev and Leonov to give them the options: they could wait for a year or more, until another craft was ready, or they could accept the risk and fly immediately. "Very cannily," wrote Leonov, in his autobiography, Two Sides of the Moon, "he added that he believed the Americans were preparing their astronaut Ed White to make a spacewalk in May. He knew how to get our competitive juices flowing. He must have known what we would say."

Early on 18 March, three cosmonauts suited up together at the Baikonur launch site in today's Kazakhstan, with Khrunov joining Belyayev and Leonov, ready to step into their shoes if necessary. He was not needed on this occasion and the men breakfasted on boiled eggs, a sip of champagne, a moment of silent reflection, and the bus ride out the launch pad. Belyayev was first aboard Voskhod-2, followed by Leonov, who had told his wife Svetlana simply that he would be embarking on "a particularly complex and challenging mission." On the stroke of 10:00 a.m. Moscow Time, the mission got off to a spectacular start—the sensation, wrote Leonov, "felt as if we were being lifted vertically by a speeding train"—and the view of Earth from space was glorious. When the final stage of the rocket separated, the cabin fell quiet—an absolute, ethereal silence, punctuated only by the ticking of the clock on their instrument panel.

For a few minutes, Leonov felt uncomfortable. His confused senses convinced him that he was suspended, upside down, but at length the two men acclimatized and prepared to extend the airlock. Oxygen was pumped into small rubber tubes along the length of the chamber, inflating it from a stubby "coil" to a full extent of almost 7 feet. As Belyayev worked the controls, Leonov strapped on his breathing apparatus, with enough oxygen for 90 minutes outside, and entered the airlock. "I closed the hatch," he wrote, "and waited for the nitrogen to be purged from my blood. With the pressure inside the airlock finally equal to zero pressure outside the spacecraft, I reported I was ready to exit." When the outer hatch opened, Leonov was positioned on his "back" … and this orientation revealed the grandeur of the Home Planet in its entirety. His heart began to race as he pushed his upper body outside and beheld the deep blue vista of the Mediterranean Sea, fringed by the recognizable shapes of Greece and Italy and, farther east, the Crimea, the Caucasus Mountains, and Russia's mighty Volga River.

Belyayev (foreground) and Leonov during Voskhod-2 mission training. For Sergei Korolev, who masterminded the planning for the world's first EVA, it would be his life's last great work. Photo Credit: Roscosmos

By now, he had pulled his feet onto the outer rim of the airlock and, confident that his tether would keep him securely anchored to the spacecraft, Leonov pushed away. The minutes which followed were electrifying in their drama and he would recall them, with the utmost clarity, even decades later. Humanity's first EVA had begun at 11:34:51 a.m. Moscow Time, only 94 minutes after launch, and the first images from the bracketed movie camera were received at the Yevpatoria control centre in the Crimea shortly afterward. Unsurprisingly, the Soviets crowed about these images in the days that followed; they were fuzzy, revealing the top of Leonov's helmet, together with his shoulders and arms, and later his entire body. Much speculation would arise over the years that the film was faked, that Sun-glint angles were not "quite right" for it to be authentic … but Leonov was disinterested in the politics. "I did not believe in all this boasting about who did what first," he wrote. "If you did it, you did it!"

One man who was interested, though, was the new head of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev.

The world's first spacewalk was as tranquil as a boat ride on a still lake. The rest of the mission would prove to be anything but tranquil.

Copyright © 2014 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

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AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
March 9th, 2014 

To Swim in Space: The World's First Spacewalk (Part 2)

By Ben Evans

Pictured on the pad at Baikonur, shortly before launch, Voskhod-2 was the Soviet Union's last major space "first" of the 1960s. The blister at the top of the payload shroud, housing the craft's airlock, is clearly visible. Photo Credit: Roscosmos

On 18 March 1965, a representative of humanity gained a view that only God or another space traveler had ever experienced: The view of Earth from high above the atmosphere—unhindered by the walls of any spacecraft—was truly remarkable, like a vast atlas, laid out before Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov … without the borders or lines. His Extravehicular Activity (EVA), or "spacewalk," lasted just 13 minutes and ended as the Voskhod-2 craft passed over the frozen wastes of eastern Siberia, when his commander, Pavel Belyayev, radioed instructions to return inside. The tranquility of floating in the sea of fathomless blackness must have been difficult to leave, but Leonov started his move back toward the airlock. Not until many years later would it become clear how close the world's first spacewalk came to disaster.

Outside, his motions had been graceful and effortless, but getting himself back into the airlock required tremendous strength, for Leonov's suit ballooned, making it extremely difficult to bend. It was, he wrote in his autobiography, Two Sides of the Moon, "impossible to re-enter the airlock feet first," and his sole option was to break mission rules and gradually ease himself back inside, headfirst. It was later reported that this caused the cosmonaut to get stuck, sideways, when he tried to turn and close the outer hatch. He realized that he needed to relieve some of the pressure in his ballooned suit to move more easily and began bleeding off some of the oxygen using a valve in its lining. Leonov was steadily becoming aware that the suit behaved quite differently in space to how it had behaved during ground trials.

Even after reducing the oxygen pressure, the problem of turning himself around in the 4-foot (1.2-meter)-diameter airlock remained. "I literally had to fold myself to do this," he said later. "I spent tremendous effort trying to do this. I had a total of 60 litres [of air] for ventilation and breathing, which was not enough for this kind of action." Doctors would later discover that he almost suffered heatstroke—his core body temperature rose by 1.8 degrees Celsius—and Leonov later described himself as being up to his knees in sweat. It was not an idle comment; the sweat sloshed around in his suit as he moved. What seemed like an eternity had actually lasted barely a quarter of an hour. Leonov was back inside the airlock by 11:47 a.m. Moscow Time, and the outer hatch was shut by 11:51 … a mere 17 minutes from depressurization to the beginning of repressurization.

Shortly thereafter, with both pilots safely inside the main Voskhod-2 craft, Pavel Belyayev fired pyrotechnic bolts to eject the airlock. Unfortunately, this explosive effect sent the ship into a 17-degree-per-second roll—10 times higher than predicted—and it was soon realised that they would have to put up with it for the remaining 22 hours of the mission; fuel levels were running low. Little could they have known that their real troubles were only beginning. First came a sharp rise in the cabin oxygen pressure, which risked an explosion if it triggered an electrical short. The cosmonauts reduced Voskhod's temperature and humidity, but the pressure remained critical, and they spent a sleepless night with eyes warily watching the gauges. At length, the pressure fell below the critical level and, thankfully, the irritating roll stopped, allowing them a few moments of tranquil flight.

Not only was Alexei Leonov's suit bulky, stiff, and cumbersome, but it ballooned toward the end of his EVA, threatening his life. Photo Credit: Roscosmos

Finally, after 16 orbits of Earth, the time came for re-entry. From the outset, this went badly wrong. A solar orientation sensor had failed, probably due to the effect of pyrotechnic gas from the jettisoned airlock, and Belyayev found himself obliged to perform a manual firing of Voskhod-2's retrorockets. The two men used the "Vzor" ("Visor") optical viewfinder for orientation, and it would appear that this kept them out of their seats for a while, delaying the retrofire by almost a minute. Coupled with an incorrect attitude, this conspired to bring them down not onto the barren steppe of Kazakhstan, but into the snowy taiga of Siberia. Soviet relations with China were not good at this time, and neither cosmonaut found the notion of landing in the People's Republic a desirable option.

At Belyayev's command, the retrorockets fired. Next, the Voskhod's instrument section should have separated from the main body of the craft. It failed to do so, and with growing horror the two men could only watch as it trailed behind them, still connected by cables. Not until they reached an altitude of 60 miles (96 km), when the cables burned through and the instrument module fell away, did the plunge through the atmosphere begin to stabilize. Descending lower, the capsule dropped into a thick canopy of cloud. Darkness surrounded them. Then it grew even darker. "I started to worry that we had dropped into a deep gorge," Leonov wrote. "There was roaring as our landing engine ignited, just above the ground, to break the speed of our descent." At last, Voskhod-2 settled to Earth with a thump.

They had landed in 6 feet (1.8 meters) of snow, somewhere in the western Ural Mountains, to the north of the industrial city of Perm. It was a little after midday in Moscow, and the recovery forces were hundreds of miles away. In the outside world, no one knew what had happened to Belyayev and Leonov. Radio Moscow played Mozart's Requiem and Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, in a somber manner, which convinced many that the pair had been killed. Tracking stations quickly confirmed where the craft had landed, but it was four hours before any word came through as to the men's health. A message over the high frequency radio channel, picked up by a station in Kazakhstan, reported "Everything normal," but no one could breathe easily until contact was made. Eventually, the capsule was spotted by a search and rescue helicopter. It was wedged between a pair of fir trees on the forest road between Sorokovaya and Shchuchino, not far from the town of Berezniki.

One of only a handful of images of Alexei Leonov during his EVA, this view shows his tether wheeling, snake-like, around him. Photo Credit: Roscosmos

Despite having been found, it was not possible to get to the cosmonauts, so inhospitable was the terrain and so treacherous was the snow. Helicopters were unable to land until loggers had cleared a path for them, and although one civilian pilot attempted to lower a rope ladder the men's suits were too heavy to risk climbing it. As dusk neared on the 18th, other aircraft dropped supplies—wolf-skin boots, thick trousers, jackets, an axe, and even a bottle of cognac—to sustain Belyayev and Leonov through the night.

As the last vestiges of daylight vanished, the temperature dropped precipitously and the pool of sweat in Leonov's boots started to chill him. Fearful of frostbite, both men stripped naked, wrung out their suits and underwear and separated the rigid sections from the lining, which they then donned, together with boots and gloves. Their attempts to pull the snagged parachute from the trees for extra insulation proved fruitless. As night approached, the snow started falling and temperatures plummeted still further to -30 degrees Celsius. Leonov related a cold night in the capsule, but stories would abound over the years that they were harassed by wolves which prevented them from disembarking and building a fire. Still others argued that mountain bears drew near Voskhod, and others that they were troubled by other "strange noises" from the dense taiga.

Leonov, for his part, mentioned nothing of this, although he admitted that when an Ilyushin-14 aircraft flew overhead at daybreak, the pilot revved his engine to scare away wolves. Later that morning, another helicopter reported seeing the cosmonauts chopping wood and setting a fire. At 7:30 a.m. Moscow Time on 20 March, a helicopter lowered a rescue team, including two doctors, a mile (1.6 km) from the capsule, and the first efforts began to fell trees to provide a suitable landing spot. Visibility was too poor to risk lifting them to a hovering helicopter, and, as a result, the cosmonauts spent a second night in the dense taiga, together with their rescuers. "But this second night was a great deal more comfortable than the first," wrote Leonov. "The advance party chopped wood and with it built a small log cabin and an enormous fire. They heated water in a large tank flown in especially by helicopter from Perm … And they laid out a supper of cheese, sausage and bread. It seemed like a feast after three days with little food."

It was a welcome relief to be with other human beings. At length, two landing spots were cleared, one of which lay just a few  miles from the capsule, and on the morning of 21 March the cosmonauts skied there. They were then airlifted to Perm airport for a telephone call from Leonid Brezhnev and finally returned to Baikonur, more than two full days after landing. Belyayev and Leonov would be rewarded and decorated for their efforts: both received the coveted Hero of the Soviet Union award, together with 15,000 roubles, a Volga car, and six weeks' leave. Their mission had secured yet another propaganda victory with which to taunt the United States, but the cosmonauts of Voskhod-2 had learned through bitter experience that the space environment is a harsh and notoriously unforgiving mistress. 

 

Copyright © 2014 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

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