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Cosmonauts Leonov & Belyaev: Voskhod II, Shell Oil Game Medal
1965 Bronze Medal 26mm (5.39 grams)
LEONOV & BELYAEV VOSKHOD 2 1965, Cosmonaut floating in space attached by tether, earth behind.
SHELL, Shell Oil logo.
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 Voskhod 2 was a Soviet crewed space mission in March 1965. The Vostok-based Voskhod 3KD spacecraft with two crew members on board, Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov, was equipped with an inflatable airlock. It established another milestone in space exploration when Alexei Leonov became the first person to leave the spacecraft in a specialized spacesuit to conduct a 12-minute spacewalk.
Liftoff took place at 07:00 GMT on 18 March 1965. As with Voskhod 1, a launch abort was not possible during the first few minutes, until the payload shroud jettisoned around the 2+1⁄2-minute mark.
The Voskhod 3KD spacecraft had an inflatable airlock extended in orbit. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov donned a space suit and left the spacecraft while the other cosmonaut of the two-man crew, Pavel Belyayev, remained inside. Leonov began his spacewalk 90 minutes into the mission at the end of the first orbit. Cosmonaut Leonov’s spacewalk lasted 12 minutes and 9 seconds (08:34:51–08:47:00 GMT), beginning over north-central Africa (northern Sudan/southern Egypt), and ending over eastern Siberia.
The Voskhod 2 spacecraft was a Vostok spacecraft with a backup, solid fuel retrorocket, attached atop the descent module. The ejection seat was removed and two seats were added, (at a 90° angle relative to the Vostok crew seat position). An inflatable exterior airlock was also added to the descent module opposite the entry hatch. After use, the airlock was jettisoned. There was no provision for crew escape in the event of a launch or landing emergency. A solid fuel braking rocket was also added to the parachute lines to provide for a softer landing at touchdown. This was necessary because, unlike the Vostok, the crew landed with the Voskhod descent module.
Though Leonov was able to complete his spacewalk successfully, both that task and the overall mission were plagued with problems. Leonov’s only tasks were to attach a camera to the end of the airlock to record his spacewalk and to photograph the spacecraft. He managed to attach the camera without any problem. However, when he tried to use the still camera on his chest, the suit had ballooned and he was unable to reach down to the shutter switch on his leg. After his 12 minutes and 9 seconds outside the Voskhod, Leonov found that his suit had stiffened, due to ballooning out, to the point where he could not re-enter the airlock. He was forced to bleed off some of his suit’s pressure, in order to be able to bend the joints, eventually going below safety limits. 456 Leonov did not report his action on the radio to avoid alarming others, but Soviet state radio and television had earlier stopped their live broadcasts from the spacecraft when the mission experienced difficulties. The two crew members subsequently experienced difficulty in sealing the hatch properly due to thermal distortion caused by Leonov’s lengthy troubles returning to the craft, followed by a troublesome re-entry in which malfunction of the automatic landing system forced the use of its manual backup. The spacecraft was so cramped that the two cosmonauts, both wearing spacesuits, could not return to their seats to restore the ship’s center of mass for 46 seconds after orienting the ship for reentry and a landing in Perm Krai. The orbital module did not properly disconnect from the landing module, not unlike Vostok 1, causing the spherical return vehicle to spin wildly until the modules disconnected at 100 km.
The delay of 46 seconds caused the spacecraft to land 386 km (240 mi) from the intended landing zone, in the inhospitable forests of Upper Kama Upland, somewhere west of Solikamsk. Although flight controllers had no idea where the spacecraft had landed or whether Leonov and Belyayev had survived, the cosmonauts’ families were told that they were resting after having been recovered. The two men were both familiar with the harsh climate and knew that bears and wolves, made aggressive by mating season, lived in the taiga; the spacecraft carried a pistol and “plenty of ammunition”, but the incident later drove the development of a dedicated TP-82 Cosmonaut survival pistol. Although aircraft quickly located the cosmonauts, the area was so heavily forested that helicopters could not land. When night arrived, the temperature dropped to −5 °C (23 °F), and the spacecraft’s hatch had been blown open by explosive bolts. Warm clothes and supplies were dropped and the cosmonauts spent a freezing night in the capsule or Sharik in Russian. Even worse, the electrical system completely malfunctioned so that the heater would not work, but the fans ran at full blast. A rescue party arrived on skis the next day as it was too risky to try an airlift from the site. The advance party chopped wood and built a small log cabin and an enormous fire. After a more comfortable second night in the forest, the cosmonauts skied to a waiting helicopter several kilometers away and flew first to Perm, then to Baikonur for their mission debriefing. 457–459
General Nikolai Kamanin’s diary later gave the landing location of the Voskhod 2, about 75 kilometres (47 miles) from Perm in the Ural mountains in heavy forest at 59°34′N 55°28′E on 19 March 1965 09:02 GMT. Initially, there was some confusion and it was believed that Voskhod 2 landed not far from Shchuchin (about 30 kilometres or 19 miles south-west of Bereznikov, north of Perm), but no indication was received from the spacecraft. Apparently a commander of one of the search helicopters reported finding Voskhod 2, “On the forest road between the villages of Sorokovaya and Shchuchino, about 30 kilometers southwest of the town of Berezniki, I see the red parachute and the two cosmonauts. There is deep snow all around…”
The capsule is currently on display at the museum of RKK Energiya in Korolev, near Moscow.
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