Gservo
20th January 2003, 02:58 AM
We all know about Gagarin and Armstrong but there are plenty of other space exploration records out there as well. Consider the USA's Eugene Cernan who holds the record for "Distance covered on board a vehicle on the surface of a celestial body". He drove 7.4 km (4.5 miles) in the buggy carried by Apollo 17. Another wanderer was the Russian Aleksey Leonov, who, in 1965, performed the first 'space walk'. The crew of the Apollo 13 mission hold the record for altitude. At one point they were 400,187 km (248,655 miles) away from the Earth's surface. Those men of Apollo 13 certainly had some problems but at least they got home alive. That's more than can be said for the first living creature in space. On November 3, 1957 the Soviets launched Laika, a small dog, into orbit. There was no way to return her to Earth so Laika circled the Earth until her oxygen ran out after about a week. She thus also became the first space fatality.