Photo: ctc-kuzbass.ru
Legendary space pilot Alexei Leonov celebrates his anniversary. On Thursday, May 30, he turns 85 years old, Kultura TV channel reports. He became the first person to make a spacewalk from the Voskhod-2 spacecraft. One of the most important events in the history of world space exploration took place on March 18, 1965. Alexei Leonov spent more than twelve minutes in a vacuum. For this feat, he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
He received the second star of the Hero of the Soviet Union for participation in the historic Soyuz-Apollo flight.
Leonov has dozens of Russian and foreign awards, he is also an honorary citizen of thirty cities of the world, a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, an academician of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics named after K.E. Tsiolkovsky. Leonov is a PhD in Technical Sciences, the author and co-author of researches and experiments.
He is also well known as an artist. The cosmonaut draws cosmic and terrestrial landscapes, portraits of friends, fantastic plots. In collaboration with the artist Andrey Sokolov, Leonov created a series of stamps of the USSR on the space theme.
The Russian cosmonauts in orbit celebrated the birthday of Leonov. Oleg Kononenko and Alexei Ovchinin devoted the spacewalk to him. Roscosmos explained that their suits were decorated with the inscriptions "Leonov No. 1" and "Happy Birthday, Alexei Arkhipovich".
Russkiy Mir
