A WOMAN IN SPACE

By the time Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich returned from their joint flight in August 1962, it was becoming clear to the western world that the Soviet space effort focused solely on scoring one ‘spectacular’ after another. Unlike the American programme, which was proving to be more gradual, yet had a longer-term aim with its Apollo Moon landing project, the Soviet leadership seemed uninterested in the exploration of space. Theirs was a programme exploited by Nikita Khrushchev’s regime purely for the political, military and propaganda advantages that it offered. One further advantage was first tabled by Sergei Korolev towards the end of 1961 and involved sending the first woman into space. On 30 December, the Central Committee of the Communist Party authorised the selection of five female cosmonauts and, by March 1962, after a lengthy evaluation and screening process, the candidates arrived at a male-dominated training facility, just outside Moscow, to begin preparations for the next Vostok stunt.

The women – Tatiana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponomaryova, Irina Solovyeva, Valentina Tereshkova and Zhana Yerkina – were put through precisely the same training regime as the men. Their advantage was aided by the apparent disinterest of the United States in selecting female astronauts of its own. ‘‘At that time in America, women tried to make their way into the Mercury programme,’’ Ponomaryova recalled in an interview years later. ‘‘They had not been invited, but some first-class women pilots began to act on their own. They reached the vice-president with their request to be allowed to participate in the space programme. Nothing came out of it, but since the Americans did not hide anything, some publications about this appeared in the press. Thus the decision [not] to create a women’s group was made at the top.’’ It was the perfect propaganda coup for a socialist state: ‘proving’ that women were, on the face of it at least, equal to men.

In spite of the obvious political nature of the decision, the women chosen all had rudimentary flying or parachuting expertise and Nikolai Kamanin envisaged a training programme of five or six months to prepare them for orbital Vostok missions. According to Ponomaryova, they ‘‘were selected through aviation clubs in the European part of the Soviet Union. They mostly selected sports parachute jumpers, since in the Vostok spacecraft the cosmonaut had to land on a parachute. Parachute jumping is a complex skill and therefore to train a novice in a short time is impossible. I had been trained as a pilot and had only eight jumps. I was a third – category jumper; in comparison to the sports master Irina Solovyeva’s 800 jumps, my eight jumps were nothing’’. However, despite checking the documents of around 200 female aviation sports candidates, Kamanin was presented with only 58 ‘suitable’ candidates, of whom five were finally selected.

‘‘When we arrived,’’ said Ponomaryova, ‘‘we were enrolled as privates of the Soviet Air Force. We found ourselves in a military unit, in which we became an alien part, with our different characters and different concepts. Our commanders had great difficulty dealing with us, since we did not understand the requirements of the service regulations and we did not understand that orders had to be carried out. Military discipline in general was, for us, an alien and difficult concept. Specialists

from Korolev’s bureau visited us and gave lectures on the Vostok spacecraft [and] specialists from other organisations also gave lectures.’’

Intensive instruction in rocket technology, navigation techniques and astronomy also formed part of the syllabus. Like their male counterparts, each woman endured repeated runs in the centrifuge, together with daily physical and vestibular training, parachute jumps and flights in two-seater MiG-15 jets to prepare them as much as possible for the weightless environment. “There were many special devices for stimulating and training the vestibular system,’’ Ponomaryova said later, including “rotating chairs, electric current, chairs on unstable surfaces and so on. ‘Real’ weightlessness was simulated with flights, first on fighter planes and later on huge, specially-designed flying laboratories. Weightlessness there lasted 20-40 seconds, just enough to notice that a pencil sharpener was floating in front of you.’’

To evaluate their responses to weightlessness, each woman had to repeat phrases, write sentences, draw shapes and attempt to eat food from toothpaste-like tubes. However, one aspect in which they were not prepared was the actual operation of Vostok, since by this point there was a high level of confidence in the automatic controls. Years later, Ponomaryova admitted that, although weight issues may have been a contributory factor in Korolev’s decision to minimise on manual controls, they were secondary to a sheer lack of understanding of how a human would behave in space. Although Gherman Titov had performed his tasks well, his unexpected sickness underlined this lack of knowledge. Spacecraft designer and Voskhod cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov later argued that the role of the human was to conduct research, not become a ‘‘servant to the machine’’. Ponomaryova, and doubless many other cosmonauts, felt the opposite: in emergencies, it would be imperative to allow the pilot a chance to control their ship.

By the winter of 1962, the training of the five women was complete and, following their final examinations, they were asked by Kamanin if they wished to become regular Soviet Air Force officers. All five accepted and were commissioned as junior lieutenants. On 19 November, when the final selections were made, Ponomaryova actually scored the best test results, but, it is said, did not offer the ‘proper’ replies to examiners’ questions. When asked ‘‘What do you want from life?’’ she is reported to have responded with ‘‘I want to take everything it can offer’’. Valentina Tereshkova, on the other hand, spoke of her ambition ‘‘to support irrevocably the Communist Party’’, which may have contributed greatly to her eventual selection as the first woman in space. Ponomaryova later suspected that her own habit as a smoker, her somewhat aggressive feminism and her failure to vocally support communist ideals had been frowned upon by the selection board. Certainly, in his diary, Kamanin felt that Ponomaryova had ‘‘the most thorough theoretical preparation’’ and was ‘‘more talented than the others’’, yet he admitted her to be ‘‘arrogant, self-centred, exaggerates her abilities and does not stay away from drinking, smoking and taking walks’’.

Kamanin definitely favoured Tereshkova, although she had not received the highest marks, and considered her the best candidate and virtually a female version of Gagarin. His exact words were that ‘‘she is a Gagarin in a skirt’’. He recommended Irina Solovyeva (‘‘the most objective of all’’) as her backup, with

Ponomaryova and the “persistently improving” Zhana Yerkina as options for later Vostoks. Kuznetsova had missed so much training that she did not take the final exams. In particular, she had performed poorly in both the pressure chamber and the centrifuge.

Plans for the flight changed considerably in the months leading up to Tereshkova’s June 1963 launch. Early options, tabled in November 1962, included sending the female cosmonaut into orbit for three or four days or flying a dual mission with two female cosmonauts – much like that of Nikolayev and Popovich – or launching a man and a woman in separate Vostoks. The latter option was finally chosen by the Central Committee on 21 March 1963, in which cosmonaut Valeri Bykovsky would fly Vostok 5 on a record-breaking mission of between five and seven days. During his time aloft, he would be joined in orbit by Tereshkova, aboard Vostok 6, for about two days. Several weeks later, at the end of April, Korolev and – surprisingly – also Kamanin were pushing for Bykovsky to attempt a mission of eight to ten days, extending Vostok’s life-support system and supplies to their limit. If successful, such a long-duration stunt would place the Soviet Union at least two years ahead of the Americans.

Still, there was some opposition to flying one woman, rather than two, particularly from the Soviet Air Force, which felt there was insufficient time to train Bykovsky for the other Vostok. Moreover, the shelf-life of spacecraft hardware expired in July 1963, necessitating a springtime or early summertime launch, and efforts to authorise ten more capsules for production had come to nothing. Plans were already underway to prepare a series of modified Vostoks, known as ‘Voskhod’, which would involve launching crews of two or three cosmonauts, crammed inside the tiny cabins, and conducting spacewalks. In March 1963, the Ministry of Defence categorically opposed building further Vostoks and it was decided that the Bykovsky-Tereshkova joint flight would be the last of the series. Kamanin, who now had four fully-qualified female cosmonauts, was livid that a dual-female mission had seemed the likely outcome and was now being eliminated at virtually the last moment.

Tereshkova, to be fair, was an enthusiastic flier and parachutist, but it was not just her careful replies to questions, or even her active membership of the Young Communist League, which endeared her to Nikita Khrushchev. Her occupation was a seamstress; an ordinary factory worker. She represented a plain Russian girl who would provide him with the chance to show that, under socialism, anybody could fly into space. Unlike the United States, which had scarcely considered female candidates during the selection of its Mercury astronaut team, Tereshkova would not be an elite intellectual, nor a professional fighter or test pilot, but instead would possess the kind of ‘common touch’ that Khrushchev liked. It was risky gamble.