Medical support of cosmonauts’ extravehicular activity

Abstract

March 18, 2015, was the 50th anniversary of the world’s first spacewalk. The man who performed this spacewalk was the Soviet cosmonaut A.A. Leonov, a participant in the Voskhod 2 space mission. In June of the same year, the American astronaut E. White, the pilot of the Gemini 4 vehicle, accomplished a spacewalk. In subsequent years, as personal space equipment systems (space suits) for extravehicular activity and their reliability improved, extravehicular activity (EVA) gradually turned from short-term episodes into planned work hours long. This article is dedicated to issues of the medical support of extravehicular activity.