Music & Techniques by Chris Vaisvil

Alexey Leonov performing the first EVA.

Walking the Airlock is a poly-tuned piece using predominately 16 and 32 edo (notes per octave) with some unavoidable 12 equal and free-pitch material. The synths used are albino, zeta+ 2.1, kontakt, session drummer 3, and izotope stutter edit. Some effects and post editing were applied. The piece was performed on an M-Audio 88es and Korg nano-kontrol 1. Recorded in Sonar X1 with its native midi arpeggiator added to the session 3 drummer track. As for the picture – per Wikipedia

– NASA planners invented the term extra-vehicular activity in the early 1960s for the Apollo program to land men on the Moon, because the astronauts would leave the spacecraft to collect lunar material samples and deploy scientific experiments. To support this, and other Apollo objectives, the Gemini program was spun off to develop the capability for astronauts to work outside a two-man Earth orbiting spacecraft. However, the Soviet Union was fiercely competitive in holding the early lead it had gained in manned spaceflight, so the Soviet Communist Party, led by Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the hasty conversion of its single-pilot Vostok capsule into a two- or three-person craft named Voskhod, in order to compete with Gemini and Apollo. The Soviets were able to launch two Voskhod capsules before the first manned Gemini was launched.

The Soviets’ avionics technology was not as advanced as that of the United States, so the Voskhod cabin could not have been left depressurized by an open hatch; otherwise the air-cooled electronics would have overheated. Therefore a spacewalking cosmonaut would have to enter and exit the spacecraft through an airlock.