Valentina Ponomaryova

Valentina Ponomaryova trains as an aeronautical engineer and pilot, one of the very few Soviet women flying powered aircraft in the 1950s.

Five women (Tereshkova, Ponomaryova, Solovyova, Yorkina, Kuznetsova) are secretly selected and trained as parachutists and pilots. Only one will fly; the group is quietly disbanded in 1969.

Chosen for her 126 parachute jumps and impeccable proletarian background as much as her flying, Tereshkova enters the secret women's group and trains alongside Ponomaryova and Solovyova.

Selected for the secret women's group, Ponomaryova is regarded by some instructors as the most technically capable, but her independence and 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 the abler Ponomaryova.

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

The women's group is disbanded without further flights. Ponomaryova 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 89, the last but one survivor of the 1962 group, having written the inside story of the women history nearly forgot.