Alexei Archipowitsch Leonov

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Alexei Leonov
Alexei Leonov
Country: Soviet UnionSoviet Union Soviet Union
Organization: WWS
selected on March 7, 1960
(1st cosmonaut group)
Calls: 2 space flights
Start of the
first space flight: 		March 18, 1965
Landing of the
last space flight: 		July 21, 1975
Time in space: 7d 0h 32min
EVA inserts: 1
EVA total duration: 24 min
retired on January 1982
Space flights

Alexei Archipovič Leonov ( Russian Алексей Архипович Леонов , scientific transliteration Aleksej Archipovič Leonov ; born May 30, 1934 in Listvyanka near Kemerovo , Russian SFSR ; † October 11, 2019 in Moscow ) was a Soviet cosmonaut who left his and the first spacecraft and only floated in space secured with a line (first external mission ). Leonov held the military rank of major general .

Life

Leonov was the eighth of nine children of a farmer and horse breeder from western Siberia. In 1948 the family moved to Kaliningrad . In 1953 Leonov joined the air force and began his training as a pilot at the Kremenchuk Aviation School in Ukraine , which he left with honors in 1955. He was then trained on fighter planes at the Tschuhujiw Aviation School until 1957 .

Vostok

In 1959 Leonow was shortlisted as a lieutenant for cosmonaut training. With 19 other pilots he then formed the first cosmonaut group in the USSR on March 7, 1960 .

In June 1963 he was a substitute pilot for Valeri Bykowski in the space flight from Vostok 5 , the second group flight of the manned space flight. Leonov was thus a candidate for another Vostok flight and did not, like other cosmonauts, begin training for the new Soyuz spacecraft in 1964 .

Vozhod

Russian commemorative coin commemorating the 50th anniversary of a person's first spacecraft mission on March 18, 1965: Alexei Leonow from Vozhod 2

In the spring of 1964 it was decided that further space flights would start with modified Vostok spaceships under the designation Woschod . The first Vozhod flight would carry science cosmonauts as passengers, while the second flight would be the first time a cosmonaut would leave his spaceship. Leonow was specially trained for the second flight and from July for the exit. On February 9, 1965 he was officially confirmed as a crew member with exit function.

Vozhod 2 took off on March 18, 1965 with Leonov and his commander Pavel Beljajew on board. In Earth orbit , Leonov was the first person to leave his spaceship and float freely in space. He was only connected to the spaceship by a 4.5 m long safety line and floated in space for about 12 minutes. This action almost ended in disaster. The space suit had so strong inflated by the pressure difference of about 0.35 to 0.40 bar to the vacuum of space and stiffened that Leonow a re-entry has been impossible in the airlock. Leonow then reduced the pressure in his suit by reducing the pressure in the suit through a valve located at the level of the right thigh to the emergency mode with only about 0.20 to 0.27 bar. Now he could return to the lock and the spaceship. In the book "Zwei Mann im Mond" Leonow describes the panic fight with the safety line during the space exit .

Due to problems with the manual ignition of the brake rocket, the Vozhod spacecraft landed 368 kilometers from the planned landing site, and Leonov and Belyayev had to wait two days in and next to the spacecraft in the taiga before the recovery could be carried out.

After this flight, Leonov spent a lot of time on lecture tours abroad.

The lunar program

In the following years Leonov worked in the Soviet lunar program . The plans were continually changed, and so changing groups of cosmonauts were trained for a time around the moon, and sometimes for a moon landing. Leonov was in the rank of commander in this program all the time. In September 1968 Leonow was one of three commanders in the shortlist for a moon flight. A nomination for the first flight was questionable, however, because Leonow forfeited sympathies in higher positions through three self-inflicted car accidents within four months, extravagant lifestyle and thoughtless remarks to the international press.

After the USA orbited the moon with Apollo 8 in December 1968 and carried out the first manned moon landing with Apollo 11 in July 1969, the Soviet lunar program was ended. From then on, more emphasis was placed on the construction and operation of space stations .

Soyuz

Leonow and Slayton in the Soyuz Orbital Module

In 1971 Leonov was scheduled to be in command of Soyuz 11 flight , which was to lead to the Salyut 1 space station . However, due to a suspicion of tuberculosis in his pilot Kubasov , the entire three-man crew was replaced two days before take-off, which saved her life. Soyuz 11 backup crew set a new long-term record in space, but suffocated on return in the Soyuz spacecraft.

Even after this accident, Leonov was scheduled to be in command of a space flight to Salyut 1. But he was not used together with his teammates Rukawischnikow and Kolodin .

Leonov was then nominated as the Soviet commander for the Apollo Soyuz Test Project . Preparations for this first international human spaceflight project took several years and required several trips to NASA in the USA . On July 15, 1975, he took off together with Kubassov in the Soyuz 19 spacecraft and two days later coupled for the first Soviet-American cooperation in space with an Apollo spacecraft manned by the US astronauts Stafford , Brand and Slayton .

Literature and painting, film

His book Walkers in Space was published in 1971, and in 1980 Ausstieg im Kosmos . In 2004 he wrote Two Men in the Moon together with the US astronaut David Scott . He also engaged in painting. Leonov was known as a cosmonaut artist who processed impressions from the flights in his art; Works by him belong to the fund of the Cosmonaut Museum in Moscow.

In the science fiction novel 2010 - Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke and its film version 2010: The year in which we make contact from 1984, the Russian spaceship that is on its way to Jupiter's moon Europe is called Leonov.

In the Canadian film The Other Side of the Moon (2003) Leonov is the main character's idol. In this film, Leonov was portrayed by Russian actor Sergei Priselkov .

The Russian feature film Die Zeit der Erste (Spacewalker) from 2017 tells the story of the cosmonauts Belyayev and Leonow and their space flight with the Vozhod 2. Here the Russian character actor Yevgeny Mironov took on the role of Leonov.

In the television series For All Mankind , Leonov is the first person to step on the moon - in an alternative world with the second, the successful launch of the Soviet moon rocket N1 and a month before Apollo 11 .

Honors

Leonow on a GDR postage stamp from 1965

The asteroid (9533) Aleksejleonov is named after him. The same applies to the rock group Skaly Alekseja Leonova in Antarctica. In his former place of residence Kaliningrad he is the namesake for the street Uliza Kosmonawta Leonowa ( Russian улица Космонавта Леонова ).

He received the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union twice , the highest distinction in the USSR and also twice the Order of Lenin and once the Order of the Red Star . In 1966 he was awarded the Karl Marx Order by the GDR and in Bulgaria he was awarded the Georgi Dimitrov order . He received honorary citizenship from the city of Altenburg , where he was stationed as a soldier. There are also numerous other Soviet and foreign awards and honorary degrees.

Works

  • Alexei A. Leonow, Vladimir I. Lebedew: Man in space. The perception of space and time in the cosmos . Urania Verlag, Leipzig / Jena / Berlin 1969
  • Alexei Leonow: Walkers in Space. Memories . Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1971, ISBN 3-421-01559-7
  • Aleksej A. Leonov, David Randolph Scott, Christine Toomey: Two men in the moon . ECON Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-430-15975-X

Web links

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Aleksei Leonov  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Russian space pioneer Alexej Leonow has died. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 11, 2019. Accessed October 11, 2019.
  2. ^ Honorary citizen of the city of Altenburg. In: abge-info.de. Retrieved December 18, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Leonow, Alexei Archipowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Alexej Archipovič Leonov, Алексей Архипович Леонов (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet cosmonaut and the first person to leave his spaceship and float freely in space
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Listvyanka near Kemerovo , Russian SFSR
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 2019
Place of death Moscow