On June 3, 1965, three hundred kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, astronaut Ed White opened the hatch of his Gemini 4 capsule and floated out into nothing. He was attached by a golden umbilical cord and held a small gas-powered gun he could squirt to push himself around. "This is the greatest experience," he told mission control. "It's just tremendous." He was the first American ever to walk in space.
White drifted, somersaulted, and watched whole continents slide by underneath his boots. He could see the curve of the Earth and the deep blackness above it. Inside the capsule, his partner Jim McDivitt snapped photographs that would become some of the most famous space pictures of the century - a man in a puffy white suit hanging over a blue planet. The Soviets had beaten the Americans into space with Yuri Gagarin and to the spacewalk with Alexei Leonov, but on this Thursday afternoon, the United States caught up in a big way. Ed stayed outside for 23 minutes, until mission control finally asked him to come back in. "It's the saddest moment of my life," he said, pulling himself toward the hatch.
Four years later, his country put astronauts on the Moon, and the photos Jim took helped convince Americans it was possible. Ed never made it that far - he died in a launchpad fire training for Apollo 1 in 1967. But his floating, smiling spacewalk is still one of the brightest moments of the entire Space Race.
