Iconic Spacewalk and Moonwalk Photos

Every photo here shows a person outside the spacecraft: floating above Earth, riding a robotic arm or standing on the Moon. The gallery runs in order from the first American spacewalk in 1965 to the first spacewalk by a French woman in 2026, one photo per outing, and favors the genuine firsts: the first space selfie, the first untethered flight, the first American woman outside, and the first three-person and all-woman spacewalks. Alexei Leonov's walk in March 1965, the first of all, is missing only because it survives as grainy film frames rather than a sharp still, and the first commercial spacewalk, on Polaris Dawn in 2024, is left out because no large, clean still of it has been released. Neil Armstrong appears only as a reflection: just one good still of him was taken on the first moonwalk, and it is a frame from a panorama rather than a portrait. Most of what remains comes from NASA's own film scans, large enough to pick out suit details, tethers and the Earth below.