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Russian female cosmonaut all dressed up but nowhere to go
Star City (Russia), June 28: After more than nine years of brutal training and patient waiting, Nadezhda Kutelnaya, the only female member of Russia`s current team of cosmonauts, is losing hope that she will ever make it into space.
Star City (Russia), June 28: After more than nine years of brutal training and patient waiting, Nadezhda Kutelnaya, the only female member of Russia's current team of
cosmonauts, is losing hope that she will ever make it into space.
"A woman in space is an exception for today's Russia,"
she sighed, pointing out that every female candidate that tried
to join Russia's space team last month had been turned away.
"This is a mentality issue -- Russian men claim they want to protect women from difficult labor," she said.
Her voice, tinged with bitterness, reveals an unpleasant reality for a country that with great fanfare sent the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963 -- a moral victory for socialist values over the United States.
Tereshkova became a role model for woman all over the Soviet Union -- including Kutelnaya, who says confidently that hurtling through space atop a fire-spewing rocket is "no more dangerous than driving a car".
An aviation aficionado, she joined an aeronautic club when she was 20, learning to pilot planes and to parachute jump.
The 1982 space flight of the Soviet Union's second female cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya, fanned her ambitions further still.
"I envied her terribly and told myself -- why not me?" Kutelnaya recalled.
"This is a mentality issue -- Russian men claim they want to protect women from difficult labor," she said.
Her voice, tinged with bitterness, reveals an unpleasant reality for a country that with great fanfare sent the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963 -- a moral victory for socialist values over the United States.
Tereshkova became a role model for woman all over the Soviet Union -- including Kutelnaya, who says confidently that hurtling through space atop a fire-spewing rocket is "no more dangerous than driving a car".
An aviation aficionado, she joined an aeronautic club when she was 20, learning to pilot planes and to parachute jump.
The 1982 space flight of the Soviet Union's second female cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya, fanned her ambitions further still.
"I envied her terribly and told myself -- why not me?" Kutelnaya recalled.