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."
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in