50 years ago, on June 3, 1965, Ed White became the first NASA astronaut to perform a spacewalk. It lasted 23 minutes. For the Americans, the Gemini 4 mission several hundred kilometers above the Earth was a major turning point in space exploration, and White successfully tested the propulsion mechanism and space suit. And if you think you read about the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first spacewalk months ago, your memory is correct. The first spacewalker was the Russian Alexei Leonov, who succeeded in his feat on March 18 of the same year.
This year is passing 50 years since the first spacewalk. The first to step on the "soil" of the deep blackness of space was a Russian Alexey Leonov (his walk during the Voskhod 2 mission takes 12 minutes), and 10 weeks later he is in uniform On ourselves a similar feat succeeded yet To Ed Whit, who tragically died a year and a half later during a testing and training mission on the launch pad atop a Saturn IB launch vehicle as part of a space expedition Apollo 1.
The American space agency has prepared on the occasion of this round jubilee documentary, which takes us to a walk through the history of space walks. Since that date, this one has done more than 260 such walks, Bruce McCandless II but he was the next NASA cosmonaut who wrote history, as he is the first cut the "umbilical cord" with mother vessel (1984).
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The first spacewalk took place just under four years after the first flight into space April 12, 1961 done by a Russian Yuri Gagarin. It was the result of a unique combination of political ambition (the space race was at its height at the time) and technical know-how.
The first spacewalk in history:
