[The same year, both the Soviets and Americans achieved the ability to keep a man alive in the emptiness of space--but the Soviets did it first.]

(March 26, 1965)

Tied to a capsule by a 16-ft. tether, the first human satellite whirled through the vacuum of space at 18,000 m.p.h. For ten minutes Soviet Cosmonaut Aleskesi Arkhipovich Leonov drifted and spun through dreamlike gyrations while he followed the spaceship Voskhod II in its swift, elliptical path around the distant earth. Then, as easily and efficiently as he had emerged from his ship, Leonov climbed back inside. After 15 more orbits, he and his comrade, Colonel Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev, began the long flight home.

With the brief solo excursion into hostile emptiness last week, Lieut. Colonel Leonov took man's first tentative step down the long and dangerous track that he must travel before he truly conquers space. Circling the earth in a sealed and well- provisioned capsule has been demonstrated to be well within human capabilities, but the moon will never be explores, to say nothing of Mars and the other planets, unless fragile men learn to function in the outside vacuum where no earth-born organisms are naturally equipped to live.

(June 11, 1965)

He stood on top of his spaceship's white titanium hull. He touched it with his bulky thermal gloves. He burned around like Buck Rogers propelling himself with his hand-held jet. He floated lazily on his back. He joked and laughed. He gazed down at the earth 103 miles below, spotted the Houston-Galveston Bay area where he lives and tried to take a picture of it. Like a gas station attendant, he checked the spacecraft's thrusters, wiped its windshield. Ordered to get back into the capsule, he protested like a scolded kid. "I'm doing great," he said. "It's fun. I'm not coming in." When, after 20 minutes of space gymnastics, U.S. Astronaut Edward Higgins White II, 34, finally did agree to squeeze himself back into his Gemini 4 ship, he still had not had enough of space walking. Said he to Command Pilot James Alton McDivitt: "It's the saddest day of my life."

White's exhilarating space stroll provided the moments of highest drama during Gemini 4's scheduled 62-orbit, 98-hour, 1,700,000-mile flight. White spent twice the time outside the spacecraft that Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov did last March 18, and he had much more maneuverability: all Leonov did was somersault around at the end of a tether, getting dizzy, while White moved around pretty much at will.

In Gemini 4, the U.S. took a big step toward closing the gap in the man-in-space race, in which the Soviet Union got off to a head start. More important, the flight signaled the advent of the second generation of U.S. spacecraft and spacemen. The two-man Gemini capsule is to the old Mercury capsule what a Thunderbird is to a Model T. For the first time, a U.S. space flight was controlled from Houston's supersophisticated Manned Space Center, which makes Cape Kennedy almost as obsolete as a place once called Canaveral.