Word: leonov
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...cooling apparatus for exploring the moon. These suits have not reached the rigorous testing stage, in which men will wear them in a vacuum chamber under the glare of simulated space radiation. Less ambitious suits for emerging from Gemini capsules are farther advanced. Like the suit worn by Leonov. they will carry their own oxygen and cooling equipment and also trail an umbilical cord as an extra safety measure. They are designed to support life in a vacuum for several hours, and U.S. space-suit experts, who were deeply impressed by the pictures of Leonov's brief excursion, suspect...
Maternal Glory. Not until Russian policies change will the full story of Leonov and Belyayev's flight become common knowledge. Only the lives of the cosmonauts themselves got a colorful airing. Leonov, now 30, was born in the village of Listvyanka in the Kuznetsk coal-mining region of Siberia, where his mother earned the Order of Maternal Glory, First Class, for her family of nine. In 1948 his parents moved to Kaliningrad (formerly Konigsberg in East Prussia), which had been abandoned by its German masters...
After finishing school in 1953, Leonov was sent by the Young Communist League to flying school at Chuguyev, near Kharkov, where he made 115 parachute jumps, became a parachute instructor, and was one of the first pilots to be selected for training as a cosmonaut. He was courting the girl whom, he was to marry when he learned that he might be sent on a novel and very difficult mission. Told that the mission would not interfere with his marriage, he signed up enthusiastically...
...Experiments. Such hero biographies, not unfamiliar in the U.S., help not at all in evaluating the flight of the Voskhod II. The TV pictures of Leonov outside the spaceship might have told much more, but they seemed to have been deliberately thrown out of sharpness, as well as cut. If Leonov experienced any kind of trouble the pictures did not show it, and official announcements about the flight were as formal as if carved in stone. "The ship's systems functioned normally," said a spokesman, "and the two cosmonauts completed all scientific experiments assigned to them...
...though, it was clear that not everything went as planned with Voskhod II. Its takeoff was normal, then it soared into a slightly more elliptical orbit than is usual for manned satellites, rising to 307.5 miles above the earth at apogee. Leonov took his vacuum stroll during the second orbit, when, as the Russians patriotically pointed out, he was over Russian soil. Then the spacecraft made 15 more orbits around the earth, followed all the while by U.S. trackers...