On the third orbit of the mission, White and his crewmate Jim McDivitt had depressurized the cabin, and begun preparations. The hatch proved cumbersome. But once opened, White stood in the hatchway, half exposed to the harsh elements of space and half secure in the spacecraft. He then tucked his legs up and over the hatch’s edge as the spacecraft orbited over Hawaii. A stray glove floated out of the capsule, past White, and off into outer space, lost for good.

For the first few minutes of the spacewalk, White maneuvered with a handheld “zip gun,” which shot compressed air into outer space. He positioned it close to his body, ensuring greater control. But after four too-brief minutes, he expended all the gas and was left navigating outer space with only the umbilical, his lifeline. Gold and shiny, and 23.5-feet long, the umbilical housed an oxygen hose, electrical connectors, and a communications lead. “You looked like you were in your mother’s womb,” McDivitt later told him.

White reveled in his newfound disorientation, free from the sensations of speed, gravity, and direction. “You could almost not drag me in,” he said, before finally relenting. White called the return to the familiarity and confines of the spacecraft, “the saddest moment of my life.”

“There was absolutely no sensation of falling. There was very little sensation of speed,” recounted astronaut Ed White in his attempt to relate the experience of spacewalking to his Earth-bound colleagues. Rather, he felt “like a weight on the end of a string.” For twenty-one minutes in 1965, White bobbed above Earth in his spacesuit, orbiting at a speedy 17,500 miles an hour. A sole golden umbilical tethered him to his Gemini spacecraft. His spacesuit’s layers of nylon, mylar, and Nomex were all that insulated him from the vacuum of outer space.

White’s spacewalk, or as NASA termed it, “extravehicular activity (EVA),” although fleeting, felt profound. “This is the greatest experience I’ve… it’s just tremendous,” he explained. So tremendous, he ignored orders and then pleas from Mission Control and his crewmate to return to the spacecraft.