Does Mars need women? Russians say no

No space for women cosmonauts
At present there are no women among the approximately 40 cosmonauts in the Russian space program. The last female cosmonaut, Nadezhda Kuzhelnaya, resigned last year after 10 years of training to become an airline pilot. On several occasions, her flight assignments aboard Soyuz space vehicles had been withdrawn and given to millionaire passengers or astronauts from the European Space Agency.

Kuzhelnaya was the last in a dwindling cadre of female cosmonauts. The first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, was launched into orbit in June 1963, and the Soviet Union proudly hailed the feat as proof of the superiority of communism and the equality of women in their country. But after strident debate within the Soviet space program, the women’s "cosmonaut detachment" was soon disbanded.

In 1975, cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, commander of the Russian half of the Apollo-Soyuz international space docking, explained to journalists why the Russian space effort didn't need women. “When we analyzed the results of her flight afterward, we discovered that for women, flying in space is a hard job. ... After training, she will be 28 or 29, and if she is a good woman she will have a family by then. Now, you don’t subject a mother to such severe physical loads that go with the training, aside from physical tensions.”

The following year, Tereshkova’s husband, fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev, elaborated: “Nowadays we keep our women here on earth. We love our women very much; we spare them as much as possible. However, in the future, they will surely work on board space stations, but as specialists — as doctors, as geologists, as astronomers and, of course, as stewardesses.”

Cosmonaut chief Vladimir Shatalov told Russian journalists in 1980 that spaceflight was too demanding for women: “In such conditions we just had no moral right to subject the ‘better half’ of mankind to such loads.”

Women rejoined the cosmonaut program only after NASA selected six female astronauts in 1978 for space shuttle missions. Ten months before Sally Ride's precedent-setting flight on the shuttle Challenger in June 1983, the Russians launched an aerobatics pilot named Svetlana Savitskaya into orbit.

Savitskaya, daughter of the Soviet Air Force's deputy commander, was then dismissed from the program together with her backup women cosmonauts. But in early 1984, when NASA announced plans for one of its women astronauts to make a 3½-hour spacewalk later that year, Savitskaya and her colleagues were called back to active duty. That July, she made a 12-day spaceflight that included a spacewalk lasting 3 hours and 35 minutes.

INTERACTIVE Video: Replaying the space race Click through highlights of U.S.-Soviet competition and collaboration

The Soviets toyed with the idea of launching Savitskaya and two other women on an all-woman Soyuz mission to the Salyut 7 space mission in 1985, but political winds were shifting in Moscow, and “space spectacles” lost favor. The all-woman mission never flew.

Several women engineers from the Russian bureau that built human space vehicles competed strenuously to get into the program as civilian flight engineers, and several achieved that designation. The only one who actually flew in space was Yelena Kondakova, the second wife of a senior cosmonaut at the bureau.

As American women continued to work their way higher within the NASA program — joining the pilot program, commanding a mission and participating repeatedly in long-term expeditions to Russia's Mir space station and the international space station — they did so without any Russian female colleagues.

Bonnie Dunbar was one of those American women astronauts. In 1994 and 1995 she trained in Moscow as a backup crew member for a Soyuz mission to Mir. Dunbar found the Russian attitude toward women to be “reminiscent of the American male chauvinism of the 1950s, only a lot worse,” she told colleagues later.

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