Valentina Ponomaryova

Valentina Ponomaryova trains as a liquid-propellant rocket-engine engineer and pilot, one of the very few Soviet women flying powered aircraft in the 1950s.

Five women (Tereshkova, Ponomaryova, Solovyova, Yorkina, Kuznetsova) are selected in stages during 1962 and trained as parachutists and pilots. Only one will fly; the group is disbanded by order on 1 October 1969.

Selected for the secret women's group, Ponomaryova is regarded by some instructors as the most technically capable, but her independence and, in Kamanin's diaries, a taste for the good life make the political selectors wary.

Kamanin backs the idea of a woman in space for its propaganda value but treats the female group paternalistically; his diaries record the calculations behind Tereshkova's selection over Ponomaryova.

Ponomaryova serves as second back-up for the Vostok 6 flight, behind Irina Solovyova; a proposed second all-female or solo women's flight is cancelled. The chance never comes again.

The women's group is disbanded by order on 1 October 1969 without further flights. Ponomaryova stays at the cosmonaut training centre as a researcher, moves to the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in 1988 and becomes a historian of the programme and, decades later, one of its most candid memoirists, a key source on how the women were used and set aside.

Ponomaryova dies at 90, having written the inside story of the women history nearly forgot.