Word: cosmonauts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...week's end, however, Fisher's star was eclipsed by a 34-year-old acrobatic pilot and parachutist named Svetlana Savitskaya, who blasted off with two male crew mates in the Soviet spaceship Soyuz T-7 on Thursday. She was only the second woman, after fellow Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, to make such a flight. With a superb sense of timing, the Soviets had sent Savitskaya into orbit in Unispace 82's closing hours...
From the very start of the missions, the remarkable effects of zero-g became apparent to Soviet doctors. Life aboard Salyut proved far from salutary. In spite of prolonged training on the ground, many of the cosmonauts could not hold their food down in the early days of a flight. Some had trouble getting to sleep, and were often awakened by the spacecraft's clattering and creaking. Others complained of fatigue and vertigo. In a revealing new book, Red Star in Orbit (Random House; $12.95), James Oberg offers some trenchant quotes from the flight diary of Salyut Cosmonaut Valeri...
Living aboard Salyut brought other hazards. In 1977, when Cosmonaut Georgi Grechko took a "space walk" outside the ship to look for some suspected damage, he suddenly saw his companion, Yuri Romanenko, drifting by. Romanenko, untethered to the spacecraft, had accidentally floated out of the cabin. Grechko caught Romanenko just as he was about to spin off into the void. On another flight, cosmonauts complained of repeated headaches. It turned out carbon dioxide was building up to dangerous levels in the cabin. The problem was solved by changing the air purifiers more often...