Spacewalk

The thing I find fascinating about early space exploration is there were so many unknowns. Could you eat food in space? Would you survive reentry? What would happen during a spacewalk?

Three months before Ed, cosmonaut Alexey Leonov made history’s first spacewalk. In the vacuum of space, his suit ballooned up to the point where it was difficult to get back into the spacecraft.

When it came to the Gemini 4 spacewalk, Ed was enjoying the experience so much that he had to be ordered back into the Gemini capsule. He and fellow astronaut James McDivitt had difficulty closing the hatch, but fortunately it did. A faulty hatch would have spelled doom for them both.

Tragically, Ed lost his life less than two years later in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire.

This piece was done completely in Procreate with Lisa Bardot’s Dry Brush set.

A couple of sidenotes:

• The gizmo Ed is holding is called a Hand-Held Maneuvering Unit, and used pressurized oxygen to propel him around.
• The Gemini was designed by Canadian Jim Chamberlin (yay!)