The first human to don a spacesuit and go outside the shuttle into outer space was destined by pedigree for the astronaut life. Edward White’s father, an Air Force officer himself. took young Ed around with him from base to base, and often into the test flights themselves. At the age of twelve, his father gave him controls of one experimental plane they were flying, and young Ed took to it like second nature. As early as then both father and son knew Ed would make a name for himself flying above the earth.

On this day, June 3, in 1965, on his third orbit around the Earth in the Gemini 4 spacecraft, Ed White made the United States’ first spacewalk. Tethered to the craft, he floated in space for some twenty minutes, using the oxygen gun he brought along for maneuvering.

White and his co-pilot, commander James McDivitt, aboard the spacecraft documented the historic spacewalk with many pictures — White from his perspective, and McDivitt from the window. The only trouble, White realized, was in what to say for the real-time voice transmissions being broadcast back home. “I thought, ‘What do you say to 194 million people when you’re looking down at them from space?’ Then the solution became very obvious to me… ‘They don’t want me to talk to them. They want to hear what we’re doing up here.’ … So what you heard were two test pilots conducting their mission in the best manner possible.”