Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space 54 years ago, has died in Moscow at age 85, Russia's space agency says.
Alexei Leonov, the legendary Soviet cosmonaut who became the first human to walk in space 54 years ago — and nearly didn't make it back into his capsule — has died in Moscow. He was 85.
The future cosmonaut had a strong artistic bent and even thought about going to art school before he enrolled in a pilot training course and, later, an aviation college. Leonov did not give up sketching even when he flew into space, and took colored pencils with him on the Apollo-Soyuz flight in 1975 to draw.
Spacewalking always carries a high risk but Leonov's pioneering venture was particularly nerve-wracking, according to details of the exploit that only became public decades later. "When we sat at the table, they said: 'why, that's not possible'," Leonov recalled in 2005."We insisted, saying that according to our tradition we must drink before work. That worked, they opened it and drank and were caught by surprise."
"We were going to stop by Alexei Arkhipovich after our return and give him our space souvenirs, but you see it wasn't meant to be," Kononenko said. His crew returned to earth at the end of June when Leonov was already unwell. Leonov — described by the Russian Space Agency as Cosmonaut No. 11 — was an icon both in his country as well as in the U.S. He was such a legend that the late science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke named a Soviet spaceship after him in his"2010" sequel to"2001: A Space Odyssey."
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