WORLD'S FIRST WOMAN COSMONAUT VENTURED INTO OPEN SPACE 20 YEARS AGO

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MOSCOW, July 25 (RIA Novosti) - Soviet pilot Svetlana Savitskaya was the world's first woman to venture into open space, July 25, 1984. She and Vladimir Dzhanibekov, her crewmate, spent three hours and 35 minutes outside their craft for unprecedented research experiments, sensational for their time.

The feat of courage brought the daring pioneer her second Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union, the USSR's supreme award. She earned her first Gold Star with the entire orbital flight.

Savitskaya never repeated her space odyssey. Up to 1989, she was department vice-manager at the Energia central R&D bureau. The company was employing her side-by-side with Valery Ryumin, her husband and fellow space pilot. Prominent community activist, Svetlana was First Deputy President of the Soviet Peace Foundation.

All Russian girl pilots who could have followed in her footsteps have now retired-not through any fault of theirs.

"There are none of the fair sex among Russian cosmonauts nowadays. Nadezhda Kuzhelnaya, the last to resign, left the Energia space rocket corporation pilot unit last June without making a single flight," Vyacheslav Davidenko, Federal Space Agency spokesman, said to Novosti.

Kuzhelnaya was dismissed from her test space pilot job on reason of age, and is now standby pilot of an Aeroflot Tu-134 jumbo jet. There are now thirteen pilots on the Russian space crew-all men, said Davidenko.

Things are contrastingly bright with American women astronauts. Shannon Lucid, for one, made five flights-the latest at an age of 53. When she was going on her maiden flight, she was 42, just the age at which Nadezhda Kuzhelnaya was forced to retire as hopelessly old.

Russia's Valentina Tereshkova was the world's first woman in space. Americans have dominated women's space effort ever since her venture, of 1963. Sally Ride, first U.S. woman astronaut, made her flight in 1983. May Jamison was the first Afro-American woman to fly into space in 1992. Aileen Collins became a first-ever Shuttle woman navigator, 1995. A year later, Shannon Lucid broke women's flight length record as she spent more than six months at the Russian orbital station Mir. Aileen Collins, then Colonel of the U.S. Air Force, made the world's first Shuttle captain, 1999.

Technical chauvinism is a baffling obstacle. Many hopefuls could never negotiate it. It was men who initially designed space equipment-and for men alone, without the slightest consideration for the female body. That is largely why the world has so few women space pilots to this day.

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