The World and Everything in It: March 16, 2026

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JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Legal Docket: a case with a long reach.

ROBERTS: Is it a butterfly effect? You know, the butterfly flaps its wings, and it has the end result halfway around the world?

NICK EICHER, HOST: The Supreme Court deciding just how far the law should reach—and where the case should be heard.

Also today—the Monday Moneybeat. Shipping slowdowns in the Strait … and amid the volatility, a market rotation underway. David Bahnsen standing by to explain.

Later: the WORLD History Book, in the Cold War space race, the Soviet program finds out the hard way. 

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

ROUGH: It’s Monday, March 16th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Jenny Rough.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

ROUGH: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Duffy on travel delays » TSA agents are reporting for work today without pay for now. They just missed their first full paycheck since the Homeland Security funding lapse began more than a month ago. They’re enduring their second shutdown in a matter of months, many have had enough.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy:

DUFFY: 300, uh, TSA agents have quit. Uh, the number of callouts are double what they were before.

More than 100-thousand DHS workers missed Friday's paycheck. Federal employees are guaranteed back pay once the shutdown ends, but there’s no telling when that will be.

Security lines have stretched for hours at major airports. And a number of airports are now soliciting public donations to help agents get by while they wait.

Democrats have refused to fund Homeland Security until Republicans agree to a list of demanded changes to immigration enforcement. But Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman has broken with his party.

FETTERMAN: Why would you wanna punish all of these workers that under DHS, only thing that it could do is just make us less safe, and that also makes people have to go without getting paid.

But California Democrat Congressman James Walkinshaw says Republicans are the ones to blame.

WALKINSHAW: The Democrats have been saying, let's fund the other agencies in DHS and continue to negotiate around ICE and CBP. There wasn't a vote in the Senate and in the House until this week.

Republicans say Congress must fund the entire Department of Homeland Security for the sake of national security.

Iran update »  President Trump says Iran is ready for talks to end the war, though he says he doesn’t think terms would be good enough yet to reach a deal.

But Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi disputed that claim, telling CBS’ Face the Nation:

ARAGHCHI: We never asked for a ceasefire and we have never. Asked even for negotiation. We are ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes.

And there are still questions about who exactly is in charge. Iranian state media last week read a statement purportedly issued by Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

But he did not appear on camera. Israel believes he was seriously wounded in the initial US and Israeli strikes. And some question whether he’s truly in charge, or whether he’s even actually still alive.

As US and Israeli forces continue to devastate Iran’s military, the regime’s greatest leverage remains its ability to largely halt commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz with threats of violence.

Energy Sec. Chris Wright says the strait is:

WRIGHT:  Very important for global commerce and for energy commerce, and they impact energy prices as we're all seeing. They have used this threat for 47 years and they've continued to build up their arsenal to make this threat. Graver and graver.

And he said President Trump is determined to end that threat once and for all.

Gas prices » But in the meantime, energy prices are surging across the globe including at the pump in the US.

AAA says the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded is now $3.70 per gallon. For perspective, a month ago, that price was $2.93.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had this message for the American public:

LEAVITT:  We understand your concerns, we hear you, and we are taking them into account and we have a plan to address them. And this is a temporary short-term disruption in global oil prices that the president is ultimately going to rectify by wiping out the rogue Iranian terrorist regime.

The Trump administration insists the long-term gain of a safer world is more than worth the short-term pain at the pump.

But Democrats continue to blast the effort as a war of choice with no clear exit strategy.

Weather » A massive storm system that buried much of the Upper Midwest in snow is now targeting the East Coast. Forecasters upgraded the severe weather risk for parts of the Mid-Atlantic to a rare level four out of five — warning of tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail today from the Carolinas to Washington D.C. 

Marc Chenard with the National Weather Service:

CHENARD: A lot of these areas are seeing one to two feet of snow portions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Northern Michigan, locally, higher totals. Um, quite a bit of wind with this storm too. So we have the blowing snow, uh, issue, uh, as well. And then the cold temperatures behind it. Um, yeah, I mean, we'll have temperatures across portions of the northern plains that get below zero.

Well over 5,000 flights have been canceled or delayed.

Meantime, Hawaii is in crisis — a rare Kona storm has triggered historic flooding and landslides, prompting the governor to declare a statewide emergency.

U.S.-China trade talks » President Trump is on track to become the first U.S. president to visit China … since visited eight years ago in his first term. And American and Chinese officials are working to make it happen.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met Sunday with China's Vice Premier for trade talks …. And they were set to meet again today. The White House hopes the talks will set the stage for a late-March summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. China has not officially confirmed the visit.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Legal Docket. Plus, the ongoing effects of the Strait of Hormuz shutdown.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday the 16th of March. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough. Time now for Legal Docket.

BARRETT: So it’s the 250th anniversary of the United States this year. And I spend a lot of time working with the Constitution and a lot of time thinking about the Constitution and its founding.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared before an audience at the Library of Congress last week and sat for a live interview. Among other topics, she addressed the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

BARRETT: The Declaration of Independence, which we celebrate this year. Abraham Lincoln described the Declaration as the promise and the Constitution as the means for fulfilling that promise. So most of my work deals with the means and the mechanisms.

She mentioned the portrait she chose when decorating her Supreme Court office. She wanted an influential woman from the founding era.

BARRETT: And obviously there were no women in the Continental Congress. There were no women in the Constitutional Convention who participated. … But I mean, when you think about who were the influential women at the time, I think Abigail Adams was just remarkable. … She had five living children. … She was a sharp observer of the politics of the time, a fierce patriot.

She also gave an example of the genius of the Constitution and why it’s mostly written in general terms.

BARRETT: If we tried to have environmental regulations … in our Constitution, it would get out of date very quickly.

EICHER: So things like that are left to the legislative process, and it brings us to our two cases she and the court are considering right now.

Both involve environmental laws at their core ,although the question before the Supreme Court focused narrowly on a technical but important question: which court should hear them—state or federal.

First case: Chevron versus Plaquemines Parish. It takes us back to a distinct historical period.

ROOSEVELT: December 7th, 1941. A day that will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

ROUGH: The day after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. formally entered World War II. War planes would need enormous quantities of a specialized high octane aviation fuel, known as avgas. So the federal government partnered with the petroleum industry to supply it.

Plaquemines Parish is oil country, situated on Louisiana’s southern tip. A parish is the equivalent of a county, and Plaquemines Parish is one of the areas where Chevron’s predecessors and others dredged canals, drilled wells, and dumped wastewater. The oil companies then shipped the extracted crude to refineries to convert it to avgas for the military.

EICHER: Plaquemines Parish says the companies that extracted the oil also did damage to the coast in violation of state law. It sued and wants Chevron to fix what it broke by restoring the disturbed marshland. Louisiana’s Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga:

AGUINAGA: They do not dispute that they dumped billions of gallons of produced water from oil wells directly into our marsh.

ROUGH: But the issue in this case, although narrow and technical, could be financially crucial: Is it heard in state or federal court? The last time related litigation stayed in Louisiana, the jury hit the company with a $750 million verdict.

The lawsuit does involve state law, and typically that means state court.

And that’s where the parish filed its lawsuit.

EICHER: But Chevron argues that a law known as the federal officer removal statute allows it to remove the case to federal court. Defendants like Chevron often prefer it, viewing it as a more neutral forum and state court as unfair.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Chevron’s lawyer Paul Clement about that.

KAVANAUGH: There seems to be a concern about the fairness of the state court system that underlies your position in this case. What is that concern?

CLEMENT: So the concern is in a nutshell, I mean … you know, really since almost the framing of the country, there’s been this problem, this issue, this concern with issues that are nationally important but locally unpopular.… We’re not saying they don’t get their chance to prove their case in court. It just has to be proven in federal court. If they can prove their case in federal court, then everybody’s going to accept the outcome, and they’re not going to view it as something that’s a product of local prejudice.

ROUGH: That term local prejudice is important. What he means by it is the financial incentives of the jury. Clement argued that cases like these do not belong before juries drawn from the local communities suing the companies.

Clement emphasized in cases like this, the jury makes more of a difference than it typically would. In federal court, the jury would be drawn from people in the greater region—

CLEMENT: But it’s not going to be drawn exclusively from people that are going to get, you know, effectively a direct benefit if the parish collects a massive windfall.

KAVANAUGH: Do you have specific concerns in this case about the state court system, or is it more the general concerns, historical concerns?

CLEMENT: Well, it’s both. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the verdict in the one case that went to trial here, which was roughly $750 million, for just one parish.

EICHER: But Louisiana’s Solicitor General Aguinaga said this case properly belongs in state court. Plaintiffs generally prefer state court for their own strategic reasons. Justice Clarence Thomas asked about that.

THOMAS: As a practical matter, what difference does it make to be in state court as opposed to federal court?

AGUINAGA: Well, Justice Thomas, I’m not going to lie, that, you know, we have the same reasons for wanting to be in a state court that anybody who sues under state law wants to be in state court. We want the actual experts interpreting state law, especially when we get to the Louisiana Supreme Court on an important statute like this and especially with response to a problem that is so sweeping in scope.

The answer to where this case belongs will depend on how the Supreme Court interprets the federal officer removal statute. That would allow a case involving state law to be removed to federal court if Chevron is able to clear a few hurdles.

ROUGH: For example, Chevron must show that, as a private party, it was “acting under” a federal officer. And it must show the challenged conduct: that is, the conduct it’s being sued for is “related to” the federal contracts.

EICHER: Plaquemines Parish argues Chevron cannot clear those hurdles. It says its lawsuit targets Chevron for its conduct over oil extraction. But the federal contracts dealt with Chevron’s refining. Because Chevron could have gone to the open market and other suppliers for the raw crude and didn’t have to drill for oil in the fields itself, the parish says Chevron wasn’t “acting under” a federal officer. Nor was its conduct “related to” fulfilling its World War II government contracts to refine petroleum.

ROUGH: Chevron’s lawyer disagreed. He said it’s a no brainer that Chevron was “acting under” a federal officer:

CLEMENT: The classic person who acts under a government official is a government contractor providing the government with what it needs to win a war.

He went on to say the kind of crude it produced was an indispensable component of the refined avgas it provided, so it satisfies the “related to” language, as well. 

But Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to know how far that would reach.

ROBERTS: How far upstream do you carry “related to?” Let’s say you have a vertically integrated company, you know, a lot of inputs, changes along the way, and at the end of it, they’re selling a product to the government. Does “relating to” go to the step that’s, you know, 10 steps above that, where they’re buying the materials, they’re shaping the materials, all this other stuff?

EICHER: Later, Justice Roberts pressed the issue on how far the phrase “related to” might stretch.

ROBERTS: Is it a butterfly effect? You know, the butterfly flaps its wings, and it has the end result halfway around the world?

ROUGH: There’s little doubt Louisiana’s coastal land is eroding. About every 90 minutes, it loses about a football field of habitable land. The decision here should establish a uniform rule to determine not only whether this case belongs in federal court, but whether some of the other land loss cases belong there too. I should note that Justice Samuel Alito recused himself due to a financial conflict.

EICHER: The second case raises a different question of procedure: when can a company miss a federal filing deadline—and still get into federal court.

It’s Enbridge Energy versus Nessel. Here, Michigan state officials sued Enbridge in state court to shut down what’s known as Line 5. Pipelines that start in Wisconsin, run under the Straits of Mackinac, and end in Canada. The pipes crossing the Straits of Mackinac are exposed and at risk of being ruptured by anchor strikes from massive freight vessels. Defendant Enbridge had 30 days to remove the case to federal court if it wished to do so. And it did, but it missed the deadline—by two years.

ROUGH: The question here is whether an exception applies. One possible exception is a doctrine called equitable tolling—which allows judges to extend deadlines when extraordinary circumstances prevent a party from filing on time.

Enbridge said it held off until a nearly identical case clarified that pipelines crossing the US-Canadian border invoked foreign policy issues, thus bringing federal issues to light. Justice Alito asked Michigan’s lawyer what would happen if the case proceeded in state court and it shut down the pipelines.

ALITO: I’d be interested in your response to the arguments … about the consequences for U.S.-Canadian relations. … What we’re told … shutting down Line 5 would result in a massive shortage of gas, diesel, and jet fuel in both Ontario and Quebec, not to mention end thousands of Canadian jobs.

EICHER: When Enbridge was at the lectern, Justice Kavanaugh asked about fairness.

KAVANAUGH: Why do you want to be in federal court?… Are you concerned you would not get a fair shake in state court?

BURSCH: I’m guessing that the Michigan state courts have not dealt very often with the federal common law of foreign affairs jurisdiction. That’s something that’s uniquely situated to the federal system.

KAVANAUGH: Doesn’t come up in federal district court litigation that much either.

Michigan’s Solicitor General Ann Sherman jumped on that.

SHERMAN: We trust state courts to adjudicate issues even to federal questions. They’ve been doing that since the founding.

ROUGH: At one point, Justice Roberts dismissed Enbridge’s lawyer John Bursch thinking the questioning had finished.

ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel.

BURSCH: Thank you.

ROBERTS: Oh, well, I do you have anything further?

JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR; Yes.

ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Why don’t you get back there? I was jumping the gun.

BURSCH: And I’m glad the chief will exercise his traditional equitable authority (laughter) to allow you to ask this important question.

The ruling will determine whether companies like Enbridge get more flexibility when federal issues surface late in litigation, or whether missing the deadline shuts the door to federal court entirely.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

The Monday Moneybeat.

It’s time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and he is here now. Good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning, Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: Well, obviously the Strait of Hormuz activity that is at the core of current uncertainty and current volatility is inextricably connected to the war, but it is a particular causation here. It has to do with the fact that there has been a basic cessation of shipping that is not really related to military strike that rendered the strait inoperable. It’s fear of activity, of drone attack, of some endeavor that is causing the insurers, the shippers, just anyone, friend or foe in the region with commercial interest, to sit tight. And so the number of ships that have now stacked up, inoperable, is massive.

That is largely being felt in the marginal price of oil and in refiner spreads, for where you can get oil. But now it has pushed margins much higher in what they call the crack spreads, in terms of refinery, but then also other products and other goods that are stuck on cargo ships.

BAHNSEN: This is a big question right now. First of all, it appears to me that it’s one of the few vulnerabilities in the way the attack and the effort, the entire operation, was planned—that it doesn’t seem that the administration was fully prepared for this, or at least had a plan for dealing with it. And that doesn’t mean they won’t come up with one, and that they’re not going to end up prevailing strategically with what needs to happen here. But I think it has caused a certain pause around, well, if they missed this, what else have they missed?

But more so, just the direct economic impact. Four days creates some inconvenience. Four weeks becomes a pretty big problem. More than four weeks becomes a massive problem. And so there is some uncertainty around this key element of global economic function.

EICHER: David, I’d like to talk about the nature of that problem. Of course, we’ve had massive sanctions on Iran. We don’t buy oil from Iran. Iran is the supplier of oil to the bad guys around the globe. So what if the bad guys don’t get their oil? Seems like that’s a good thing. Why does it hurt the whole economy, and not just them?

BAHNSEN: Well, it doesn’t, if all we were talking about—you know, India shouldn’t be buying oil from Iran. China and Russia do, and they’re the bad guys. If that’s all we were talking about, it wouldn’t be an issue. But there is other necessity through the Strait of Hormuz as a commercial waterway, getting products to certain parts of Europe and Asia and getting liquefied natural gas out of other elements of the Gulf.

So this has a Persian Gulf story that goes far beyond Iran selling to Russia, and it also is incoming and outgoing. And so there is a complexity that becomes, again, all economics is done on the margin, and it becomes marginally significant.

EICHER: Well, David, I’d like to talk now about something you identified in your Dividend Cafe, a rotation going on among investors in the market—not a collapse in the market, but money moving into what we would call real economy sectors: energy, utilities, consumer staples—and decidedly away from speculative tech. Is that a temporary thing? Is it Iran-related? Or do you think it’s more of a permanent phenomenon?

BAHNSEN: No, it’s not Iran-related at all. It had gone on, and really sort of began in the fourth quarter of last year. A lot of the hot tech companies peaked in September or October. The high for Oracle was September. The high for Nvidia was October. And you saw healthcare rally significantly in the fourth quarter, utilities and industrials.

And so when I refer to real economy, I’m talking about things that people are using day to day a lot more. They use their gas, an electric bill. Consumer staples have rallied a lot in the first 10 weeks of this year—the diapers and paper products and food and beverage items that are necessities in everyday life.

I think that when we talk about how long-lasting it will be, we don’t really know where some of the AI narrative is going to go and when some of the excess in some of the tech valuations are going to be let out. But I think that if the rotation were to change and the tech side were to not rally, then you would be talking about a whole-market retracement.

But clearly, as we’re sitting here talking before the market is opened on Monday, the S&P is down just barely 3% on the year. The NASDAQ is not even down 5%—I think it’s 4.8%. That’s not a correction. That’s not obviously a bear market. It’s a very minimal drop. But the reason is that there are things like energy up over 20%, utilities up over 10%, consumer staples up over 6%. That’s really the definition of a rotation. And I think that at this point now we see how the Iran war affects all of this.

EICHER: All right, David, before we go, just one more item from your Dividend Cafe. This past week, you identified kind of a tug of war in the U.S. economy between growth and stagnation, and what you’re saying is that stagnation right now has the edge. What has to happen for that to change?

BAHNSEN: The Supreme Court throwing out all of the tariffs. [laughs] I kid, I kid!

Look, the tariffs are weighing on the economy, and it’s not a political opinion. It’s not me editorializing. This is economically, objectively true.

I am utterly shocked that the high, and I think somewhat faulty, measure of rent inflation that was pulling the total inflation number higher, that it’s come down as it has, and yet the total inflation number has stayed where it is because goods inflation went from 0%—there was no goods inflation in aggregate for all of 2024 and much of the end of 2023—and now it’s come up to 1.7%, 1.8%.

We’re used to getting downward pressure in goods prices and services being the thing that holds it higher. And now all the tariffed items are putting upward pressure on those prices, offsetting what should be a price benefit from the lag effect of shelter inflation coming down.

As far as economic stagflation, look, there’s still this hope I have that the really significant incentives for business investment kick in and offset some of the cost of tariffs. I really believe it’s going to be $200 billion of tax benefits this year to capital expenditures, but we’re not seeing it yet. And I think, other than AI, a lot of the reason for capital expenditures being held back is uncertainty about tariff costs. And we’re seeing that in hiring plans too.

Fortunately, we’re not seeing a major escalation of firings yet, but you’re just not seeing a lot of new job hiring. And I think that has to do with people not knowing what the impact is going to be in their business with tariffs. And this should be unsurprising when you look at the dollar amount of what’s going on—over $300 billion of new cost. That’s a massive amount of money that has to be absorbed by American importers

EICHER: David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of the Bahnsen Group. at DividendCafe.com and at WORLD Opinions.

David, hope you have a great week this week. I just want to thank you again for the work that you did with our staff this past week at our retreat. Very much appreciated. So thank you for that, and thank you for this.

We’ll see you next week.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Today is Monday, March 16th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

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.

ROUGH: 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.

WORLD’s Kristen Flavin now with that story.

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. 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. It was a historic mission 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]

ANCHOR: CBS television presents a special report on Sputnik 1, the Soviet space satellite. Douglas Edwards reporting.

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 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? Fighting off the snakes and realizing they're there. Are you gonna focus on the snakes? 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 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: 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 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 into the spacecraft feet first.

LEONOV: 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.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: more on how the war in Iran is going. And, what's next for the voter ID SAVE Act? We’ll have a report. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

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

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says about Jesus:“Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him. And he asked them, ‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’ And they answered, ‘John the Baptist. But others say, Elijah, and others, that one of the prophets of old has risen.’ Then he said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ And Peter answered, ‘The Christ of God.’” —Luke 9:18–20

Go now in grace and peace.

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