On June 3, 1965, NASA astronaut Ed White carried out his 21-minute long spacewalk. He was enjoying the spacewalk so much that he did not want to return to the Gemini IV mission craft and was ordered to be back.

After receiving the orders, he told his fellow astronaut James McDivitt, “I’m coming back in…and it’s the saddest moment of my life”. Now after 50 years, NASA is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first American spacewalk.

In NASA’s terminology, spacewalks are known as extravehicular activity (EVA). When spacewalks were carried out at the time of Leonov and Whit, astronauts and cosmonauts were tethered to stop them from floating away into space.

Things changed in 1984 when NASA started to use jetpacks that allowed to astronauts to move around with nothing attaching them to the spacecraft. Bruce McCandless of the Challenger shuttle was the first astronaut to try this way of spacewalk.

It cannot be denied that spacewalks are considered to be dangerous. One of such incidents took place in 1997 when astronaut Dave Wolf and Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev were locked out of the Mir space station because airlock failed to re-pressurize.

The pair had to spend many hours trying to fix the airlock. When everything failed, they took the risk to improvise an airlock from another section of the space station and their lives were saved.