Voskhod 2 completes humanity’s first spacewalk. The next day its crew manually returns to Earth—and lands in snowy forest beyond ordinary helicopter reach.
Humanity had learned to walk in space. The trip home ended among the trees.
On Thursday, 18 March 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov climbed through an inflatable airlock attached to Voskhod 2.
He became the first human to leave a spacecraft and move through open space.
That alone was enough for one historic mission.
Getting home provided another story.
Voskhod 2 carried Leonov and commander Pavel Belyayev. When the mission was ready to return to Earth, the automatic orientation system did not function as planned.
The crew had to orient the spacecraft and perform the descent manually.
That worked.
Accuracy was another matter.
On Friday, 19 March, Voskhod 2 came down not near the prepared recovery zone but in snow-covered forest in the Perm region.
The spacecraft had returned from orbit. The recovery teams now had to retrieve two cosmonauts from dense taiga.
Aircraft located them, but trees, deep snow and difficult terrain made an ordinary helicopter landing impractical. Supplies and clothing could be dropped, but the crew could not simply be lifted out.
The first rescuers reached them on skis. More people then worked to create a route and a clearing through the forest, and the cosmonauts were not delivered to Perm until 21 March.
It was a strange conclusion to a mission built around one of humanity’s most futuristic achievements.
A day earlier, Leonov had floated outside a spacecraft above Earth.
Now both cosmonauts were back on Earth, surrounded by snow and trees, waiting for people on skis to reach them.
The mission was a historic success. Leonov’s spacewalk demonstrated that a person could leave a spacecraft and return to it. Belyayev’s manual descent brought the crew safely through re-entry.
But Voskhod 2 also demonstrated another principle of early space exploration:
Landing on Earth and being conveniently accessible on Earth were two entirely different accomplishments.
Humanity had solved the problem of walking in space.
The Soviet recovery teams still had to solve the forest.
The first human spacewalk succeeded—and the return finished with two cosmonauts safely back on Earth but inconveniently located in snowy taiga.
The Soviet Union mastered walking in space before it mastered parking near the recovery team.
Evidence status
Sources
Russian archival record
Original language: RussianSpace-agency records
European Space Agency — Alexei Leonov, the first spacewalker
Original language: EnglishFirst-person historical account
Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine — The Nightmare of Voskhod 2
Original language: English