Voskhod 2

Voskhod 2 was the March 1965 Soviet mission that carried out the first human spacewalk. Pavel Belyayev commanded the two-person Voskhod spacecraft, while Aleksei Leonov used the Volga inflatable airlock and Berkut spacesuit to leave the vehicle. ESA's account describes the mission objective as beating the U.S. Gemini program to an EVA, while Spacefacts details the airlock, suit-pressure difficulties, manual reentry, and remote landing that made the flight far more hazardous than the public milestone suggested. The mission lasted a little over one day and proved that extravehicular activity was possible, but it also exposed practical problems in EVA suit mobility, spacecraft layout, reentry control, and recovery operations.