Soyuz 7K-ST No. 16L (sometimes known as Soyuz T-10aorT-10-1) was an unsuccessful Soyuz mission intended to visit the Salyut 7 space station, which was occupied by the Soyuz T-9 crew.
It was set to launch atop a Soyuz-U rocket on September 26, 1983. However, prior to launch, the rocket caught fire on its launch pad at Site 1/5, Baikonur Cosmodrome. The launch escape system of the Soyuz spacecraft fired two seconds before the launch vehicle exploded, saving the crew of commander Vladimir G. Titov and flight engineer Gennadi Strekalov. It is so far the only case in which a launch escape system has been fired with a crew aboard.
The mission was a visiting expedition to Salyut 7. The crew was scheduled to return in Soyuz T-9, leaving Soyuz T-10 for the crew on the space station to return in later. The failure briefly led to speculation in the West that the crew of Soyuz T-9 may be stranded on the space station, but this was never the case. That crew would return to Earth as normal on November 23, 1983, aboard Soyuz T-9.
On March 18, 1965, he became the first human to conduct extravehicular activity (EVA), exiting the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission for a 12-minute spacewalk. During the spacewalk, he encountered severe difficulties due to the design of his spacesuit.
Leonov had been tapped to be a commander for the Soviet crewed lunar programs, and would've commanded the first crewed Soyuz 7K-L1Zond mission if it were ever cleared to proceed. He was selected as commander of Soyuz 11, the second planned (and first successful) mission to the Salyut 1 space station, but the entire crew was swapped out when crewmate Valeri Kubasov was suspected of contracting tuberculosis. This saved him from dying when Soyuz 11 de-pressurized during re-entry, killing the cosmonauts on-board.
Leonov would serve as "Chief Cosmonaut" from 1976 through 1982, and retired from the Soviet space program in 1991. He would spend time in the private sector in post-Soviet Russia, most notably at Alfa-Bank, until he retired for good in 2001. He has written several books about his space experience, including a joint biography with American astronaut David Scott in 2006.
…that when investigating the Challenger accident, Richard Feynman threatened to remove his name from the report unless it included his personal observations on the reliability of the shuttle?
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