Home > Aleksei Leonov

Leonov was one of the 20 air force pilots selected as the first cosmonaut group in 1960. His spacewalk was originally to have taken place on the Vostok 11 mission, but this was cancelled, and the historic moment happened on the Voskhod 2 flight instead. By then, he had spent some eighteen months undergoing intense weightlessness training.

In 1968 Leonov was selected to be commander of a circumlunar Soyuz flight. However as all unmanned test flights of this mission failed, and the Apollo 8 mission already gave that point in the Space Race to the USA, the flight was cancelled. In 19711971 is a common year starting on Friday (click for link to calendar). Events January January 1 British divorce Reform Act comes into force January 2 66 die in stairway crush at Rangers v Celtic football match, Glasgow, Scotland. See Ibrox disaster. Janua Leonov was to have been part of the ill-fated Soyuz 11Soyuz 11 succeeded in completing the mission that Soyuz 10 had failed at carrying cosmonauts to live on the world's first space station, Salyut 1. Cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev, and Vladislav Volkov spent three weeks testing the Salyut's mission, but his crew was replaced with the back-up after Cosmonaut Valery Kubasov was suspected to have tuberculosisTuberculosis is also called TB consumption (TB seemed to consume people from within with its symptoms of bloody cough, fever, pallor, and long relentless wasting), wasting disease White Plague (TB sufferers appeared markedly pale), phthisis (Greek for con.

Leonov's next trip into space was similarly significant — he commanded the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, Soyuz 19, the first joint mission between the SovietThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1 and US space programmes.

From 1976 to 1982, Leonov was the commander of the cosmonaut team ("Chief Cosmonaut"), and deputy director of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, where he oversaw crew training. He also edited the cosmonaut newsletter "Neptune". He retired in 1991.

Leonov currently chairs an investment corporation in Moscow. He is an accomplished artist and his work has been widely exhibited and published.

The fictional spaceship Aleksei Leonov from Arthur C. Clarke's book was named after Aleksei Leonov.