An Impression of Space

"My first impression when I opened the hatch was of a huge Earth and of the sense of unreality concerning everything that was going on. Space is very beautiful. There was the dark velvet of the sky, the blue halo of the Earth and fast-moving lakes, rivers, fields and clouds clusters. It was dead silence all around, nothing whatever to indicate the velocity of the flight . . . no wind whistling in your ears, no pressure on you. The panorama was very serene and majestic."

— Valentin Lebedev, describing his spacewalk of 30 July 1982 (portrait below).