Learning the hard way in space

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, March 16th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough. 

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the space race. 

In the depths of the Cold War, President John F. Kennedy announced an ambitious goal:

KENNEDY: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard!

EICHER: The United States wanted to prove its technological edge over Soviet Russia. But before anyone could land on the moon, they needed to know how to survive there.

Kristen Flavin now, with the World History Book. 

KRISTEN FLAVIN: On March 18th, 1965, Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first man to walk in space. 

He would exit the spacecraft using the inflatable airlock, attach a camera to the outside of the craft to document his spacewalk, and float freely in the silence of space.

LEONOV TRANSLATION: And I heard how my heart was pounding. I could hear myself breathe.

After that, he says in a 2015 interview, he noticed the stars.

LEONOV TRANSLATION: The stars were very bright. There was a lot of them. And it was interesting that they were everywhere. They were above and they were beneath. And on the ground, we can only see stars up in the sky. In space, they are everywhere.

Leonov was outside his Voskhod 2 spacecraft for a total of 12 minutes and 9 seconds. And people across Europe and Russia watched on TV.

For Russia and the U.S., this was more than a feat of science. It was driven in part by an ideological battle between communism and freedom.

CBS NEWS: [Sputnik beeps]

And the Soviets were winning.

EDWARDS: Until 2 days ago, that sound had never been heard on this earth. Suddenly, it has become as much a part of 21st century life as the whir of your vacuum cleaner.

The space race had begun 8 years earlier after the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite. The Americans tried to launch their own version: the Vanguard Test Vehicle Three.

AUDIO: [Explosion]

But it lost thrust just two seconds after liftoff, 4 feet off the ground, before exploding on the pad. It was a humiliating failure made worse when Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and orbited the Earth.

The Americans were losing ground.

WILMORE: You gotta realize the geopolitical climate of the day.

Captain Barry Wilmore is a retired NASA astronaut and Air Force test pilot. He says the U.S. space program’s motivation was political, to prove that a free-enterprise economy could produce better results than communist Russia.

WILMORE: We viewed it as the people were being oppressed in certain respects because they didn't have the opportunity to have the ingenuity and go forward and prosper in a capitalistic fashion.

Wilmore says the United States chose to approach space carefully and methodically.

WILMORE: You can't just fire off a rocket and go to the moon.

NASA wanted to understand the impacts of the vacuum of space. In a vacuum, water boils, and NASA wanted to be sure that wouldn’t happen to an astronaut’s blood. They needed to know it was safe to exit the spacecraft.

WILMORE: So you have to learn how to survive in those environments because you know eventually you're going to have to go outside and fix things. So you're going to have to be in a vacuum… you got to prepare.

Part of that preparation goes beyond the physical to crisis management, developing that “cool under pressure” mentality so common in astronauts. 

It’s situational training called “snakes in the cockpit.”

WILMORE: Things go wrong in the cockpit. It's almost like your cockpit fills with snakes, and how are you gonna handle that? You know, fighting off the snakes and realizing they're there; are you gonna focus on the snakes? Or are you gonna focus on the issue that you're dealing with?

Meanwhile, the Soviets took the opposite approach, rushing to keep their lead. They largely improvised Leonov’s spacewalk mission, and it nearly cost Alexei Leonov’s life.

Leonov’s spacesuit expanded in the vacuum, ballooning to a point of becoming completely rigid.

LEONOV TRANSLATION: During the 8th minute, I all of a sudden realized that my fingers got loose and they kind of came off the glove and inside the glove. I immediately realized that I have got to do something…

He couldn’t bend his joints or fit back into the airlock.

LEONOV: So what should I do? What should I have done? Drop the pressure. In five minutes, I was supposed to be in eclipse. And then, I silently, violating every single rule and regulation, without reporting anything to the ground, I drop the pressure to .27 atmosphere.

WILMORE: You have to do that in a delicate fashion, because as pressure changes, your inner ear, your eustachian tubes and all that has to balance pressure or you can literally blow out an ear drum if you do it too fast.

A pressure drop can also cause decompression sickness. And Leonov’s core body temperature jumped dangerously high, putting him at risk for heatstroke.

LEONOV: I was sweating. I could not see much because of the sweat.

After slowly dropping the pressure, Leonov then had to try to get back into the airlock.

LEONOV: And I tried to kind of break this spacesuit in order to get back to the airlock with my legs first.

That didn’t work, so he went head first and managed to twist his body back around so he could get in the spacecraft feet first.

LEONOV: And that was by far the most difficult thing with the hedge of 190 centimeters.

But the danger wasn’t over. The capsule landed hundreds of miles off-course in a remote, mountainous Russian forest. Leonov and his crewmate spent two frigid nights surrounded by bears and wolves until rescue crews could reach them on skis.

NASA engineers studied Leonov’s nearly disastrous spacewalk and learned critical lessons. Lessons about how spacesuits react to vacuums, and the importance of airlock size and design.

Just 10 weeks later, Astronaut Ed White walked outside the Gemini 4.

WHITE: I feel like a million dollars!

Although Gemini 4 had its own share of issues, White nearly doubled Leonov’s spacewalk, spending 23 minutes outside the spacecraft until mission control ordered him back inside.

That set the stage for other Americans to eventually take the first—and only—steps on the moon.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book, I’m Kristen Flavin.

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