 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Film Projection on the Moon
Background to Soviet space mission Voskhod 2
crew of Colonel Pavel Belyayev and Lt. Colonel Aleksey Leonov.
During Voskhod 2's second orbit, Leonov stepped from the vehicle and performed mankind's first "walk in space." After 10 min of extravehicular activity, the mission almost ended in disaster when Leonov was unable to reenter the airlock due to
stiffness of the inflated spacesuit. He had to bleed air from the suit in order to get into the airlock. After Leonov finally managed to get back into the spacecraft cabin, the primary hatch would not seal completely. The environmental control system
compensated by flooding the cabin with oxygen, creating a serious fire hazard
(Cosmonaut Bondarenko had burned to death in such circumstances, preceding the
Apollo 204 disaster by many years).
On re-entry the primary retrorockets failed. A manually controlled retrofire was accomplished one orbit later. The service module failed to separate completely, leading to wild gyrations of the joined reentry sphere - service module before connecting wires burned through. Vostok 2 finally landed near Perm in the Ural mountains in heavy forest at 59:34 N 55:28 E on March 19, 1965 9:02 GMT.
The crew spent the night in the woods, surrounded by wolves, before being located.
The recovery crew had to chop down trees to clear a landing zone for helicopter recovery of the crew, who had to ski to the clearing from the spacecraft. Only some days later could the capsule itself be removed.
Although trumpeted to the world as a triumph (with suspect TV pictures and film of the spacewalk which did not match), this was the swan song of the Soviet space program.
source: www.astronautix.com / © Mark Wade, 2002
