When Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov conducted the world’s first space walk in 1965, the mission nearly ended in catastrophe. After 12 minutes outside the Voskhod spacecraft, the vacuum of space had caused Leonov’s suit to inflate so much he couldn’t get through the air lock. He was forced to manually vent oxygen from inside the suit to reduce its size and get back onto the ship before the effects of decompression sickness overcame him.
Amazingly, the design of many of the space suits in use today hasn’t changed that much. The Russians still use a variant of Leonov’s one-size-fits-all suit, the Orlan M, and the Chinese use the visibly similar Feitian. And while NASA’s Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) has been updated since its initial development in the 1980s, its primary life support system dates to the Apollo missions of the 1960s.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
