(See Cover) Tied to a capsule by a 16-ft. tether, the first human satellite whirled through the vacuum of space at 18,000 m.p.h.
For ten minutes Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov drifted and spun through dreamlike gyrations while he followed the spaceship Voskhod II in its swift, elliptical path around the distant earth. Then, as easily and efficiently as he had emerged from his ship, Leonov climbed back inside. After 15 more orbits, he and his comrade, Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev, began the long flight home.
With that brief solo excursion into hostile emptiness last week, Lieut. Colonel Leonov took man's first tentative step down the long and dangerous track that he must travel before he truly conquers space. Circling the earth in a sealed and well-provisioned capsule has been demonstrated to be well within human capabilities, but the moon will never be explored, to say nothing of Mars and the other planets, unless fragile men learn to function in the outside vacuum where no earthborn organisms are naturally equipped to live.
Leonov's short "stroll" into personal orbit was one of the most remarkable achievements of the remarkable age of space. The Soviet success, said Kurt Debus, German-born director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center, "points to sophistication in manufacturing, computers, metallurgy, ballistics, space medicine and the pure sciences. This effort proved in one stroke their standing in all these fields."
Characteristic Prudence. Well aware that their cosmonaut would be exposing his vulnerable body to several kinds of sudden death, the Russian space officials were characteristically prudent. Only when he was safely back aboard the Voskhod II did they announce the flight and release TV pictures of his lofty acrobatics so that the world could get a guarded glimpse of the wildest space fantasy made real.
Dim and probably purposely fuzzy shots showed the round white top of a helmet poking slowly out of a hatch.
Then came the visored face of a man, followed by his shoulders and his arms.
He seemed to push something away with his left hand before he moved his left arm back and forth as if to test its freedom. He reached for a hand rail, and quickly his entire body came clear of the hatch. Now it could be seen that he was dressed in a bulky pressure suit, with cylinders strapped on his back and a thick cable twisting behind him.
The camera followed as Leonov tumbled and turned through casual somersaults while the curving edge of the distant, sunlit earth supplied a moving backdrop. Next came TV shots of Voskhod's interior, with Leonov relaxing next to Capsule Commander Belyayev. Light streaming through a porthole showed the spacecraft to be revolving at about one revolution per minute.