Word: cosmonautics
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...mission's unquestioned highlights are the untethered space walks on Tuesday and Thursday. Spacemen have been venturing outside their spacecraft ever since Cosmonaut Alexis Leonov undertook the first EVA (for extravehicular activity, in NASA jargon) in 1965. But they have always been securely hooked to a lifeline. This time they will rely entirely on a Buck Rogers-type contraption called, with a touch of sexism, a manned maneuvering unit...
...capabilities of the Salyut-Cosmos-Soyuz complex are currently being tested by the cosmonaut team of Vladimir Lyakhov and Alexander Alexandrov, who joined Salyut on June 28. (A previous docking attempt by three other cosmonauts in April was aborted, because of a faulty guidance system.) As usual, the Soviets have been vague in defining the nature of experiments conducted by the pair, other than to admit that it includes orbital photography...
...nothing intrinsically extraordinary about her achievement. Women have been doing just about everything else in recent years, even piloting jet aircraft as big or bigger than the shuttle. So why not space? Indeed, in a Marxist-Leninist bow to women's lib, the Soviets launched a woman cosmonaut precisely 20 years ago, though a second did not follow until last summer (see box). "It's too bad," scowls Ride, "that society isn't to the point yet where the country could just send up a woman astronaut and nobody would think twice about...
Attractive and svelte at age 46, Tereshkova today is divorced from the fellow cosmonaut she married after the flight. She remains a popular public figure and has taken on such ceremonial chores as addressing a huge peace rally in Moscow's Olympic stadium last month. But if Tereshkova's mission was so successful, why did the Soviets wait 19 years before they sent a second woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, 34, into orbit last summer...
...Soviet Union, the Berezovoy-Lebedev mission has sparked a rare public debate over one major question: How long can a person stay aloft before suffering irremediable harm? Cosmonaut Valeri Ryumin, who had set earlier flight records by orbiting the earth for 175 and 185 days, believes the safe limit has been breached. Says Ryumin, now a senior program chief at the Soviet space control center outside Moscow: "It appears to me that four months is the optimal period...