Milestone: 50 years of spacewalking

• The Soviets did it first. Alexei Leonov made history, venturing into space on March 18, 1965. While the spacewalk was seen as a victory for the USSR, it was also nearly a disaster. In an interview with the BBC, Leonov spoke of nonstop trouble. He had problems with his spacesuit. Then the oxygen levels inflated inside the craft, and the cosmonauts “narrowly avoided being obliterated in a huge fireball,” the BBC reported. They arrived back at Earth hundreds of kilometers off target in a remote corner of Siberia “populated by wolves and bears.”

• The first American astronaut to walk in space was Ed White during the Gemini IV mission on June 3, 1965. He was 35 years old. As the walk progressed, millions of Americans watched on television or listened on the radio, NASA recounts. White took photos and at one point bumped into the spacecraft.  White died tragically on Jan. 27, 1967, in an Apollo spacecraft fire during a launch pad test at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

• Spacewalking became a more daring proposition on Feb. 7, 1984, during the first untethered spacewalk. NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II used a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit.

• Astronauts and cosmonauts routinely do spacewalks for repair work on the space station. But it can still be dangerous. In 2013, the movie Gravity kept theatergoers at the edge of their seats with a story about astronauts left floating after their shuttle meets with disaster. It was fiction, but NASA was soon grappling with a real emergency. Luca Parmitano, an Italian astronaut, nearly drowned when his helmet unexpectedly filled with water during a spacewalk in July 2013.  

     Related:

     NASA in Brief -- Astronauts repair space station

     NASA in Brief -- Scientists discover 715 new worlds; spacesuit helmet leak probed