Last week on the show we told you about Vladimir Komarov’s mission aboard Voskhod 1.  This week in rocket history, we have the follow-up mission: Voskhod 2. It launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 18, 1965, at 07:00 UTC.

Commander Pavel Belyayev and pilot Aleksei Leonov rode the three-staged Voskhod launch vehicle to an orbit of 498 by 137 kilometers with an inclination of 65 degrees towards the equator.

The Voskhod 2 capsule was a modified version of the first Voskhod and had an inflatable Volga airlock attached to the main hatch. This meant that in the case of an emergency during takeoff or landing, the crew could not eject.

During their second orbit, Cosmonaut Belyayev deployed the airlock and extended it out into space. Cosmonaut Leonov then entered the airlock in his modified Vostok Sokol 1 flight suit and strapped himself to a bungee cord and an umbilicus which provided oxygen. Belyayev then closed the hatch from the inside of the capsule and started depressurizing the airlock. When the airlock’s pressure was equal to that of outer space, Leonov opened the outer hatch of the airlock and pushed himself out. At that moment, he became the first person in history to perform an Extra-Vehicular Activity in space, commonly known as a “Space Walk”.

The spacewalk lasted over 10 minutes, during which Leonov reported seeing the stretch of Earth from the straits of Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea. When the time came to re-enter the capsule, Leonov realized he had a problem: his spacesuit was deformed due to its internal pressure pushing out against the vacuum of space. He could barely move and his feet and hands were no longer firmly secure in his boots and gloves. He had no way to pull himself back into the airlock.

Not wanting to cause alarm on the ground, he decided not to report on his condition. Leonov realized that he could lower the pressure by slowly releasing the trapped oxygen by opening a specialized valve installed in his suit. As the oxygen left his suit, he gradually regained a bit of flexibility – just enough to be able to pull himself back in and close the airlock’s outer hatch.

With Leonov safe onboard, the issues continued for the daring cosmonauts. Just as they were preparing for their deorbit burn, Leonov reported that their reentry guidance system (the system responsible for guiding their descent back into the atmosphere) was not functioning at all, and they had to rely on manual piloting for the extremely risky maneuver.

Leonov recalled that the next call from mission control, which had Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the line, asked them where they landed. They hadn’t even re-entered the atmosphere, yet. It seemed that mission control had no idea what was going on. Belyayev informed them of their situation, and the crew started to prepare for re-entry.

Belyayev was responsible for orienting the craft into the correct angle for re-entry, while Leonov had to calculate where they would land as a function of when they fired their engines. Leonov had to choose a location that was in the Soviet Union, sparsely populated so bystanders weren’t in harm’s way, but also not completely desolate so they could be rescued in a reasonable amount of time in case his calculations were off.

He aimed for the city of Perm, and at the appropriate time, Belyayev fired the retro engines for ten seconds and then separated from the capsule’s orbital module.

Still, as Leonov wrote in an article for the Air & Space Magazine, “[s]omething felt very wrong”. As they entered the atmosphere, they felt way more drag than they had anticipated. After a while, they started feeling intense gravitational forces, with Leonov reporting his instruments measured as much as ten gees. He looked out his window and saw that they were spinning rapidly. One of the cables attached to the orbital module did not separate correctly, so they were dragging it along with them into the atmosphere. This caused their center of mass to shift enough for the capsule and its attached baggage to tumble and spin.

Eventually, the cable burnt up and broke, and at an altitude of about 100 kilometers, the craft stabilized. Everything else during landing worked nominally, with the drogue parachutes and the landing parachutes opening just when they should have, and eventually, the retro-rocket designed to slow them down fired, and they made a safe landing just 2000 kilometers outside of Perm in Siberia. Remember, Leonov was aiming for Perm, not the wilderness 2000 kilometers outside of it.

The area they landed in was extremely hard to get to, had harsh weather, and was known to be home to wild bears and wolves. What’s worse, they weren’t even sure that ground control knew where they landed. After a couple of hours, they were spotted by a civilian cargo plane, who informed some local pilots. A rescue mission was arranged using a helicopter, but the forested terrain the cosmonauts were in made it impossible to land. The helicopter also tried pulling them up with an improvised rope ladder, but their spacesuits were too heavy and got caught in the thick trees.

The civilians did everything they could to help, including dropping them a bottle of Cognac (which broke) and an ax, but it was getting dark and extremely cold. The stranded cosmonauts pulled the capsules’ parachutes over the capsule as means of insulation, got back into the capsule, and went to sleep.

The next morning they were met by a rescue party, who were led there by the local pilots who had seen them the day before. The rescue party included a fellow cosmonaut, two doctors, and a film crew, but the stranded cosmonauts were still in no condition to get back to the city by themselves. The rescue party made sure that the cosmonauts were warm, safe, and fed until the next morning when they found a clearing in the forest large enough for a helicopter to land – some nine kilometers away – from which they were finally picked up.

As a final note – the source for most of this story is the aforementioned article written by Leonov himself in Air & Space Magazine, which will be included in the show notes, and is a fascinating and recommended read.

More Information

Launch of Voskhod-2 (Russian Space Web)

The Nightmare of Voskhod 2 (Air & Space Magazine)