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Female cosmonaut puts spaceflight dream on hold

After more than nine years of brutal training and patient waiting, Nadezhda Kutelnaya, Russia's only female member of Russia's current team of cosmonauts, is losing hope that she will ever make it into space.

"A woman in space is an exception for today's Russia," she sighed, pointing out that every female candidate that tried to join Russia's space team last month had been turned away.

"This is a mentality issue -- Russian men claim they want to protect women from difficult labor," she said.

Her voice, tinged with bitterness, reveals an unpleasant reality for a country that with great fanfare sent the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963 -- a moral victory for socialist values over the US.

Tereshkova became a role model for woman all over the Soviet Union -- including Kutelnaya, who says confidently that hurtling through space atop a fire-spewing rocket is "no more dangerous than driving a car."

Having graduated the Moscow Aviation Institute, Kutelnaya worked as an engineer at the Energiya space construction agency, mastering Sukhoi and Yakovlev planes and completing 30 parachute jumps and 500 flight hours.

However it was only in 1994 that she ventured to apply for the cosmonaut team. Three years later she was chosen for elite training for a future mission to the orbiting International Space Station (ISS).

She was finally due to make her first space flight as a space engineer in April 2001, but three months before the launch her place was taken up by US millionaire Dennis Tito, who paid US$20 million to become the world's first space tourist.

In October 2001, Nadezhda acted as a double for French astronaut Claudie Haignere, her hopes high as doubles are traditionally chalked up for the next mission.

However, in April last year another space tourist, the South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, beat her to a place in the Soyuz vessel bound for the ISS.

Russia has sent three women to space so far -- first Tereshkova, then Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982 and 1984, and finally Yelena Kondakova.

But Nadezhda's last hope died in February, after the disaster on the US shuttle Columbia, when Russian space agency chief Yury Koptev warned that female cosmonauts would not make it to the ISS "any time soon."

Still, Nadezhda, whose meager salary is her family's chief source of income and who lives with her retired husband and their four-year-old daughter in a cramped studio in the Moscow suburb of Star City, continues her training "to stay in shape."

After all, her very name is a Russian word for "hope."
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