Svetlana Savitskaya

• 1. Introduction

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  Svetlana Savitskaya was sixteen years old when she began jumping out of aircraft without telling her parents. She had hidden a parachute knife in her school bag, and her father only discovered the secret when he found it. That father was Yevgeny Savitsky, a highly decorated fighter pilot from the Second World War who would rise to become Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Air Defense. When he found the knife, he did not punish her. He encouraged her. By her seventeenth birthday, she had already completed 450 parachute jumps.

  That detail tells you something essential about Savitskaya: she did not wait for permission, and she did not settle for ordinary. She would go on to set world records in the stratosphere, win an aerobatics world championship, break the sound barrier at over 2,600 kilometers per hour, and become the first woman to walk in space. She did all of this within a Soviet system that was often more interested in what her achievements said about the USSR than what they said about her.

  Who was the woman behind those records? How did a parachute knife in a school bag lead to a spacewalk above the Earth? And what happened to the missions that came after, the ones that never flew?

• 2. Born Into Speed

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  Yevgeny Savitsky's discovery of that parachute knife opened a door rather than closing one. Within a year of her seventeenth birthday, Savitskaya was setting records from the stratosphere, leading jumps from 13,800 meters and then from 14,250 meters. Over the course of her career she accumulated three world record stratosphere jumps and fifteen world record jumps from jet planes.

  Her competitive career in aerobatics ran from 1969 to 1977, and she represented the Soviet national team throughout that period. At the FAI World Aerobatic Championships in July 1970, held at Hullavington in the United Kingdom, she flew a Yak-18 and won the world championship alongside an all-female team. A journalist from the British press nicknamed her "Miss Sensation" at that event. She placed third at the 1972 World Championships in Salon-de-Provence, and fifth in Kiev in 1976 flying a Yak-50.

  Formal education ran alongside all of this. She graduated in 1966 and enrolled at the Moscow Aviation Institute, where she also took flight lessons. By 1971 she held a flight instructor's license. She graduated from the institute in 1972 and moved on to the Fedotov Test Pilot School, completing that training in 1976. In May 1978 she joined the aircraft manufacturer Yakovlev as a test pilot. It was at the controls of a MiG-25 that she reached 2,683 kilometers per hour, making her the first woman to achieve that speed. She would later set FAI world records for altitude in horizontal flight at 21,209.9 meters in a MiG-25, and for speed over a circuit of 500 kilometers at 2,683.45 kilometers per hour.

• 3. The Cosmonaut Selection

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  In 1979, Savitskaya entered the selection process for the second group of female Soviet cosmonauts. Of the nine women ultimately chosen, she was the only test pilot. On the 30th of June 1980, she was officially admitted to the cosmonaut group. The announcement of the group's training was made during the space mission of French Air Force officer and astronaut Jean-Loup Chretien.

  She passed her qualifying exams on the 24th of February 1982. The Soviet program had a clear political motive for flying her quickly. The mission of the second visiting expedition to the Salyut 7 space station was described as an effort to demonstrate Soviet superiority by putting another woman in space, nineteen years after Valentina Tereshkova had become the first. In December 1981, Savitskaya began preparing for that flight.

  Those who worked with her in the program described her as an extremely serious, unbending, and steely woman. Those qualities that had driven her to jump from the stratosphere in secret now carried her into a training program that would send her to a space station in orbit.

• 4. Soyuz T-7: First Orbit

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  Soyuz T-7 launched on the 19th of August 1982, with Commander Leonid Popov on his third spaceflight and flight engineer Alexander Serebrov on his first. Savitskaya held the position of research cosmonaut. During the flight she claimed to have tied herself down to avoid drifting between compartments in the absence of gravity.

  The three cosmonauts docked with Salyut 7 the following day. They were welcomed by Anatoly Berezovoy and Valentin Lebedev. For the first time in the history of human spaceflight, a space station held a mixed-gender crew. Savitskaya was assigned the orbital module of Soyuz T-7 as a private area, though she slept alongside the men in the station itself.

  The crew returned to Earth on the 27th of August 1982, traveling in Soyuz T-5, the vehicle they had been sent to replace. The total mission lasted 7 days, 21 hours, and 52 minutes. That flight alone made Savitskaya a Hero of the Soviet Union, and she received an Order of Lenin. The flight also made her an Honorary Citizen of Baikonur. The political purpose had been served, but her own plans were already pointing toward something more difficult.

• 5. The First Spacewalk

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  In December 1983 Savitskaya was assigned to her second flight, including an extravehicular activity. The timing was notable: the assignment came three weeks after American astronaut Kathy Sullivan's own EVA assignment was made public. Savitskaya was selected over other female cosmonauts because of her extensive flight experience and her physical capacity to operate in a heavy space suit for multiple hours. She flew this mission as flight engineer.

  The practical goal of Soyuz T-12 was to bring tools to Salyut 7 so the resident crew, the Salyut 7 EO-3, could repair a fuel line. The central tool was the Universal Hand Tool, known by its Russian acronym URI, which had been developed at the Paton Institute in Kiev. The URI could cut, solder, weld, and braze in the vacuum of space.

  Soyuz T-12 launched on the 17th of July 1984 with Commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov and research cosmonaut Igor Volk. On the 25th of July 1984, Savitskaya and Dzhanibekov went outside Salyut 7. She became the first woman to conduct a spacewalk. The EVA lasted 3 hours and 35 minutes. During that time she performed 6 cuts of titanium and stainless steel, 2 coatings of anodized aluminum, 6 tests of tin and lead solder, and a test cut of a 0.5-millimeter titanium sample. The return to Earth came on the 29th of July 1984. The mission total was 11 days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.

  The work done outside the station had lasting consequences. The training and tests that Savitskaya and Dzhanibekov completed enabled Dzhanibekov to later guide two Salyut 7 crew members, Kizim and Solovyov, through the URI techniques needed to complete the actual fuel line repair. Of the 57 Soviet and Russian spacewalkers through 2010, Savitskaya remained the only woman; as of April 2020 she was still the only Soviet or Russian woman to have walked in space.

• 6. The Mission That Never Flew

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  After returning from her second flight, Savitskaya was assigned as commander of an all-female Soyuz crew intended to mark International Women's Day. She was chosen because she was the only experienced female cosmonaut still on active duty. Her crew was to include Yekaterina Ivanova and Yelena Dobrokvashina.

  The mission unraveled through a chain of separate failures. In February 1985, Salyut 7 lost radio contact entirely. The station was rescued only by the Soyuz T-13 mission in the summer of 1985. Then in November 1985 the next mission was cut short when commander Vladimir Vasyutin fell ill. A shortage of available Soyuz spacecraft, following two mission failures in 1983, made scheduling the women's flight impossible.

  A later possibility emerged: flying to the space station Mir aboard a Soyuz-TM. That option was not pursued either. Savitskaya was pregnant, and her son Konstantin was born on the 7th of November 1986. The all-female mission was canceled for good, leaving her with two flights and a spacewalk as her complete record in orbit.

• 7. Life After Space

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  In February 1986, the same year her son was born, Savitskaya graduated from the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School. She held a position of Deputy Head of NPO Energia from 1983 to 1994, and retired from the Russian Air Force in 1993 at the rank of Major.

  Her political life ran parallel to her technical one. She was elected a people's deputy of the USSR in 1989 and a people's deputy of Russia in 1990, serving until 1992. She did not welcome the collapse of the Soviet Union. She said that her parents would suffer a "second death" if they could see Russia as it became. In 1994 and 1995 she worked as an assistant professor in Economics and Investment at the Moscow State Aviation Institute.

  In 1996 she was elected to the State Duma as a representative of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and has been re-elected four times. She serves as Deputy Chair of the Committee on Defence and holds membership in the presidium of the Coordination Council of the National Patriotic Union. In 2014 she was one of five cosmonauts chosen to carry the Russian flag at the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics. The asteroid 4118 Sveta carries her name.