Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov

views updated

Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov

1934-

Soviet cosmonaut who made the world's first space walk and participated in the first international space mission. Leonov left Voskhod 2 for ten minutes during its March 1965 flight, floating at the end of a 17-foot tether. Ten years later, during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project flight, Leonov and Valery Kubasov docked their spacecraft with a three-man American ship in Earth orbit. The twoday rendezvous symbolically ended the Soviet-American "space race" of the 1960s.

More From encyclopedia.com