Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in the space in 1965, passed away on Friday in Moscow at the age of 85. According to the Russian media, Leonov had health issues for several years.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos said it was saddened to announce the death of “cosmonaut No 11” who was twice decorated with the country’s top honour, the Hero of the Soviet Union.
He was born in 1934 into a large peasant family in western Siberia. Like countless Soviet peasants, his father was arrested and shipped off to Gulag prison camps under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, but he managed to survive and reunite with his family.
Leonov was an icon both in his country as well as in the US, so much so that the late science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke named a Soviet spaceship after him in his 2010 sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Spacewalking always carries a high risk but Leonov’s pioneering venture was particularly nerve-racking, according to details of the exploit which only became public decades later.
The cosmonaut was well known for his humour. Once the U.S. Apollo and Soviet Soyuz capsules docked in orbit around Earth on July, 17, 1975, Mr. Leonov and his Russian crewmate, Valeri Kubasov, welcomed the three U.S. astronauts, their Cold War rivals, with canned borscht disguised as Stolichnaya vodka and suggested a toast.
