Mike Bezemek is the author and photographer of three books that combine stories with trip guides, including Paddling the John Wesley Powell Route: Exploring the Green and Colorado Rivers and Discovering the Outlaw Trail: Routes, Hideouts, and Stories from the Wild West. His newest book, Space Age Adventures: Over 100 Terrestrial Sites and Out of This World Stories, was published in June.

How the First Spacewalk Ended in a Ski Trip

In mid-May 1965 Voskhod 2 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. During the second orbit, the commander, Pavel Belyayev, deployed the Volga airlock, an eight-foot-long inflatable tube. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov squirmed his way into a backpack oxygen tank. After Leonov crawled into the airlock, Belyayev closed the hatch and drained the air. A minute later, Leonov floated out into space, attached to a 16-foot tether. The first spacewalker in history.

During his ten minutes outside, problems arose for Leonov. The suit was incredibly hot, and Leonov claimed he began sweating profusely. The arms and legs of his spacesuit over-inflated from air pressure, which limited his mobility. To reenter the airlock, he had to open the bleed valve on his spacesuit, risking decompression sickness.

Once aboard, problems continued when the automatic reentry rocket failed. Belyayev had to manually fire the backup, which caused the spacecraft to come down hundreds of miles off course. Parachutes brought them down in the Perm region, near the Ural Mountains. The capsule landed on deep snow between two fir trees in dense forest.

Helicopters located them within hours, but finding no place to land, all they could do was drop supplies and warm clothes. The cosmonauts spent a below-freezing night in the hatchless capsule, claiming to hear howling wolves. The next afternoon a rescue party on skis arrived, but given the hour, it was too late to egress. They all built a large camp with a fire and were forced to spend another night in the woods. The next morning, the historic mission took its final turn, with the cosmonauts donning boots and clutching poles. As they departed the capsule, the first human spacewalk ended with a ski trip.

In Moscow, the new Soviet leader was less than impressed. During the same day Voskhod 1 had spent in orbit, Nikita Khrushchev had been ousted in a coup, allegedly for his increasingly erratic behavior. Replacing him was Leonid Brezhnev, a more pragmatic leader, less smitten with expensive space spectacles. From a political standpoint, Korolev had lost one of his most enthusiastic supporters.

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Space Age Adventures is available to order now. You can find a previous excerpt here about exploring the Armstrong Air & Space Museum, or read about the trip that inspired Space Age Adventures here. Visit Mike Bezemek’s website for more.