Svetlana Savitskaya
Second woman in space; first woman EVA, 1984
Timeline - Savitskaya in the record
6 referenced events from the Secret Dawn - Among the Stars archive.
Svetlana Savitskaya, daughter of an air-force marshal, becomes a champion aerobatic and test pilot, setting world aviation records and flying supersonic jets before she is thirty.
Nineteen years after Tereshkova, the programme selects a second cohort of women; Savitskaya, the outstanding test pilot, is chosen to fly.
Savitskaya's flights are hurried partly on intelligence that the United States is about to fly Sally Ride and a female spacewalker; the 'firsts' are timed as much by espionage as by science.
Savitskaya flies to Salyut 7 aboard Soyuz T-7, pointedly a year before the Americans fly Sally Ride. Her male crewmates offer her an apron; she declines.
Aboard Salyut 7, Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform an EVA, cutting and welding metal in orbit, a first the Soviets stage partly to pre-empt the Americans' first female spacewalker.
A planned all-female Soyuz mission that Savitskaya would command is cancelled after the Salyut 7/Mir handover; she leaves the corps and enters engineering and, later, politics.