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."
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
In the East Room of the White House on a particularly frigid Saturday afternoon, US President Joe Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 of the most famous names in politics, sports, entertainment, civil rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy and science. Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton aroused a standing ovation from the crowd as she received her medal. Clinton was accompanied to the event by her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and grandchildren. Democratic philanthropist George Soros and actor-director Denzel Washington were also awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in a White House
Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia was expected to meet Argentine President Javier Milei yesterday on a regional tour to drum up support ahead of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s swearing-in for a third term. Venezuelan authorities have offered a reward of US$100,000 for information leading to the capture of Gonzalez Urrutia, who insists he beat Maduro at the polls in July last year and is recognized by the US as Venezuela’s “president-elect.” The 75-year-old fled to Spain in September after being threatened with arrest by Maduro’s government, but has pledged to return to his country to be sworn in as
RSS