Svetlana Savitskaya

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 by the NASA selection of six women in 1978 and American plans to fly a woman; the 'firsts' are timed as much by rivalry as by science.

Savitskaya flies to Salyut 7 aboard Soyuz T-7, pointedly ahead of the first American woman in space. By the often repeated story, her male crewmates offer her an apron and 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; no source in this archive gives a reason. She leaves active cosmonaut service in October 1993 and enters the Duma in December 1995.