Into the Void

Alexei Leonov, March 18, 1965 Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images

On March 18 fifty years ago, the first human took his first step into space. Russian Alexei Leonov was out there for a little more than 12 minutes. "What remains etched in my memory," he recalled recently, "was the extraordinary silence, my heart beating, and difficulty I had breathing." But breathing was not the only problem he encountered. "After 8 minutes of free floating, I clearly felt the volume of my spacesuit change," he says now. "After calculating the amount of time in light and oxygen supply I had left, I decided to drop the pressure inside the suit ... knowing all the while that I would reach the threshold of nitrogen boiling in my blood, but I had no choice": http://news.yahoo.com/eva-50-cosmonaut-alexei-leonov-took-1st-spacewalk-180043817.html;_ylt=A86.JySM1glVJUkApJEnnIlQ and http://time.com/3745861/leonov-spacewalk-50th-anniversary/
   Leonov's feat proved that such a thing could be done and inspired many spacewalks since, including that of Edward White, the first American to walk in space, three months later (slideshow): http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/g1922/history-of-spacewalks-50th-anniversary/?slide=1