An Important First Step for the United States Space Program.
The U.S. Space Program is now celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its first spacewalk. That event marked the beginning of the United States leading the world in spaceflight and space exploration. The man who took the first spacewalk for America, in June 1965, was United States Air Force Major Ed White. He got out of the NASA Gemini IV craft, spacewalked while tethered, and made history. His crewmate, James McDevitt, was inside the spacecraft in case help was needed. Major White made the 23-minute walk without incident. He actually used a prototype gas gun to get around in the super low-gravity environment.
First spacewalk for U.S. marked beginning of space dominance.
Since that proud moment, the U.S. has landed humans on the moon, deployed telescopes as well as countless probes, put a rover on Mars, and built the International Space Station. That list of awesome space stuff done by the U.S. will soon be augmented by NASA’s Mars mission. The goal is to have astronauts on Mars at some point in the 2030s, and NASA has been taking great steps to get there. Recently, it tested a flying saucer-like Low Density Supersonic Decelerator for the mission. Perhaps if this crucial first step hadn’t been accomplished by Major White, the United States space program would not be what it is today, and we wouldn’t be witnessing as many fascinating, difficult, ambitious missions.
First person to spacewalk was actually Russian.
The first spacewalk ever actually took place a few months before the United States one, in March. Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov left his spacecraft, the Voskhod (“Sunrise” in English) for 12 minutes. Alarmingly, upon attempting to return to the Voskhod, he found that his suit had over-inflated and he was too bulky to fit through the hatch. He eventually let pressure out of his suit by opening a valve in it, and made it inside the spacecraft, thus completing the first spacewalk ever done by any human.
