Two Trailblazing Spacewalks in 1965 Opened the Door to Decades of Astronauts Pushing the Limits of Their Capabilities

Since those early steps, extravehicular activity has helped provide the solutions to many problems that astronauts face in space

Alice George - Museums Correspondent

March 18, 2025

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Just four years after the first human traveled to space, a Soviet cosmonaut and later an American astronaut took next steps that would be vital to exploration: They walked in space.

A spacewalk, when astronauts exit their vehicles while in space, is also known as extravehicular activity, or EVA. Soviet Aleksei Leonov became the first person to walk in space 60 years ago, on March 18, 1965, when he spent about 12 minutes outside his space capsule. Less than three months later, American Ed White took a longer stroll of about 23 minutes during Gemini 4’s mission.

The early flights were handicapped by bulky suits and an unanticipated need for gloves capable of precise movement. Both men experienced difficulty maneuvering, and yet both found the exercise stunning. Leonov has been quoted as saying, “The silence struck me. I could hear my heart beating so clearly. I could hear my breath—it even hurt to think.” He struggled to get back inside his spacecraft because his suit had expanded, and the effort led to a 13-pound weight loss from perspiration. White said he had fun during his walk and called the return to his spacecraft “the saddest moment of my life.”

“The capability of doing a spacewalk is an extraordinary component of human spaceflight because it really puts the human at the greatest level of danger imaginable,” says Jennifer Levasseur, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “You’re no longer protected by this vehicle, but by a different kind of a machine that’s almost like wearing a scuba suit.” It’s often called the astronaut’s “personal spacecraft.” None of the early spacewalks went flawlessly, and, she says, “most spacewalks have little hiccups.”

Still, 60 years after the first spacewalks, Levasseur finds it extraordinary that they have become so common and vital. “We’ve come an incredibly long way, in human spaceflight generally, but with the ability to put people outside, to do work. I mean, that’s the thing: The first ones were really just floating around.”

In 2015, Levasseur wrote that the walks were “the start of how we understood human activity in the setting of space, and like a child, these first tentative and careful steps led to decades of new capabilities.” The challenges of those early EVAs were real, but through experience and training on Earth, spacewalks have become less like daring exploits and more like well-practiced necessities.

Astronauts learn from scenarios run on Earth, often in swimming pools. Both Americans and Soviets used very large pools that made it possible for astronauts to float halfway down in the water with air supplied by a hose.

By practicing assigned tasks repeatedly on Earth, the astronauts acquire the muscle memory necessary to carry out a crucial job in space. NASA learned from astronaut Gene Cernan’s harrowing 1966 spacewalk that the most important parts of the body in the exercise are the hands. “You can think about it like a rock climber … where you’re having to move across something with the hands as the primary mode of transportation,” says Levasseur.

Although Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were not scheduled to walk in space during the first lunar landing mission of 1969, Apollo 11, they underwent training for the extravehicular activity of moving around on the moon in spacesuits that provided a life-sustaining environment with a cooling layer underneath. The Manned Spacecraft Center, later renamed the Johnson Space Center, developed larger pool facilities to help astronauts deal with walks. While the first moonwalkers were most concerned about their ability to navigate lunar terrain, the last three lunar flights—Apollo 15, 16 and 17—required a “deep space EVA” in which one astronaut gathered film magazines used in lunar orbit, removing them from a craft that would not return to Earth.

NASA’s first spacewalk work project occurred on Skylab, the first American space station. Skylab 1 was uncrewed when it was sent into Earth orbit on May 14, 1973. The station was damaged after its launch, forcing NASA to delay launching the crew and to map out and practice procedures for correcting Skylab’s problems.

When the first crewed mission was launched on May 25, with Skylab 2’s commander Pete Conrad, pilot Paul J. Weitz and science pilot Joseph P. Kerwin aboard, they began their work in orbit by flying around the station and identifying problems. The micrometeoroid shield and one solar array were missing, and the remaining solar array was damaged. Initial efforts to repair one of the solar arrays failed, so the astronauts entered the station on the following day and deployed a parasol to reduce internal temperatures to more tolerable levels. At that point, the astronauts began their scheduled lab work; however, without the power expected from the solar arrays, what they could accomplish was limited.

On June 7, Conrad and Kerwin passed through NASA’s first airlock, designed to allow an easier transition for individuals moving into and out of a space environment. The two astronauts got to work on the precarious task of opening a jammed solar array. After the longest spacewalk at that time—3 hours and 25 minutes—Skylab had working solar panels. During the process, the men were forced to yank open the solar wing, which had a hinge that had been frozen by the cold of space, and were thrown backward when they succeeded. Fortunately, tethers kept them from floating into the unknown. Afterward, they were able to pursue their original scientific mission to conduct experiments in Earth orbit.

Levasseur notes that the museum holds a fascinating artifact used in their efforts: a cutting tool. “They improvised this system whereby they kind of welded these clippers to two aluminum poles, and they strapped this pulley system that would allow the astronauts to move this tool toward a metal strap that was stuck, and the astronauts could maneuver themselves to get near it,” she says. “The idea was that they could do this and get close enough and get on that strap [and] that the strap would then release, and they would have some of their solar power back again.”

Over the course of two years, a trio of three-man crews occupied Skylab for 171 days and conducted almost 300 experiments. Much of this would have been impossible without Conrad and Kerwin’s spacewalk or the simulations performed on Earth.

The next crewed space effort, NASA’s Space Shuttle Program, operated from 1981 to 2011, and had 135 missions. This era saw 52 spacewalks, which covered a wide variety of goals, including several repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope and steps to build the International Space Station (ISS). In 1984, Bruce McCandless made the first untethered spacewalk using a device known as the manned maneuvering unit, expanding the flexibility of astronauts in space.

Spacewalkers typically work in pairs, but on one shuttle mission, STS-49, a third crew member joined the team outside the shuttle when two astronauts were unable to catch a satellite. With the added help, they succeeded.

Overlapping with NASA’s Shuttle Program was the Russian Mir space station, which launched in February 1986 and remained in service for 15 years, three times its planned lifetime. During that time, crew took 79 spacewalks, many of which were intended to repair the station and extend its lifetime. In the 1990s, the United States, Russia and other nations agreed to shared missions on Mir, and the U.S. shuttle visited Mir multiple times. Thus, it became a proving ground for the ISS.

At the ISS alone, astronauts have made 274 spacewalks since December 1998. The longest of these lasted 8 hours and 56 minutes, and the shortest was 19 minutes. There have already been two spacewalks this year. In addition to the United States and Russia, space travelers from other nations, including China, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain and the United Arab Emirates have participated in spacewalks. Many have been scientific in nature, but the ability of astronauts to go outside their space homes has also allowed them to make necessary repairs and prolong the durability of their crafts. The ISS has already outlived its projected lifetime, and it is expected to remain in operation until at least 2030.

Even with strict requirements for admission to NASA’s space program, Levasseur says, not all astronauts are cut out for spacewalking. “It comes down to who the person is and what their capabilities are, and their ability to really focus and be in a confined space.” For instance, you cannot scratch your nose or move hair out of your face. “There’s a lot of downside in terms of what we naturally do as humans that goes away when you’re inside a spacesuit, and so it takes a special kind of individual.”

Alice George | | Read More

Alice George, Ph.D. is an independent historian with a special interest in America during the 1960s. A veteran newspaper editor, she is recently the author of The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn and has authored or co-authored seven other books, focusing on 20th-century American history or Philadelphia history.