It’s been five decades since American astronaut Edward White pushed himself out of his Gemini 4 capsule, stepped into the void — if one can “step” into anything while traveling at 17,000 m.p.h. — and became the first American to walk in space. It is a pivotal, celebrated moment in NASA’s annals; the space-age equivalent of a ship captain sketching a small human hand with a pointing finger in the margin of his otherwise perfunctory daily log, indicating an especially notable occurrence.\nMoreThe Other Giant Leap: What Happened to the First Man to Walk in SpaceWhy Russia Won’t Catch Up in the Space RaceSuspect Captured in Deadly Arizona Shooting Spree NBC NewsDurst Had Mask, Fake ID and $42,000 Cash When Arrested NBC NewsFriends Remember Murdered Food Network Star NBC NewsThis mattered, the drawing says. This will be remembered.\nPopular Among Subscribers\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAmy Schumer: Class Clown of 2015\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe\n\t\t\t\t\t\tCuba LibreBitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing UsOf course, the men and women at NASA and other space agencies around the world haven’t exactly been resting on their laurels since that day. More than a few humans have walked on the moon; the Space Shuttle program has come and (lamentably) gone; intrepid souls have engaged in “untethered extra-vehicular activities” a hundred miles above the planet; we’ve landed a prodigiously sophisticated, El Camino-sized roving laboratory on Mars; and not that long ago, the middle-aged and still-frisky Voyager 1 probe left our solar system and entered that mysterious realm known as interstellar space.\n[MORE: Read Jeff Kluger’s “Gravity Fact Check: What the Season’s Big Movie Gets Wrong.”]\nStill, all these years later, there’s something about White’s space walk — and, especially, about the wonderful color photographs of the endeavor made by Gemini 4 commander James McDivitt — that stirs heady emotions in the viewer.\n\n\nThere is a kind of riveting unease in the acknowledgment that the white-suited figure in the photos willingly left the relative safety of a cramped, 4-ton sardine can in order to float in space — a speck in the cosmos — and that no amount of testing can truly prepare anyone, or any mission, for that sort of landmark maneuver.\nThere is awe at the unparalleled beauty of the blue Earth so far below, weaving its ancient, elliptical course through the heavens.\nFinally, there is at least a small measure of pride, warranted or not, in the realization that a mortal man, one of us, had the guts, the smarts and faith enough in himself and in his colleagues to do what Edward White did. (Note: Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov was the very first person to walk in space, just three months before White’s walk, in March 1965.)\nWhite and McDivitt’s adventure, meanwhile, remains notable no