Alexei Leonov

Alexei Leonov was born in a Siberian village, the eighth child of a miner who was arrested as an enemy of the people in 1937 and later freed. The family was thrown out of their home and neighbours took their possessions. He grew up wanting to paint, and got a place at an art academy in Riga, but could not afford it. He joined the air force instead, and drew and painted for the rest of his life.

On 18 March 1965, on the Voskhod 2 flight, he squeezed through an inflatable airlock and floated free on a tether above the Earth for about twelve minutes, the first person to do so. Then the trouble started. In the vacuum his suit ballooned until his fingers came out of the gloves and he could not bend enough to enter the airlock feet first. He opened a valve and let air out of the suit, risking the bends, until he could pull himself in head first and turn round in a space barely wider than his shoulders. His temperature rose sharply and sweat filled his boots.

The automatic re-entry system then failed, and he and Pavel Belyayev fired the retrorockets by hand and came down 400 kilometres off target in the forests of the Urals. They spent two nights in deep snow surrounded by wolves before skiers reached them. None of this was made public for years.

In 1975 he commanded the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the first joint flight with the Americans, and shook hands with Tom Stafford in orbit. He died in Moscow in 2019.