Russian cosmonaut blasts through gender barrier

MOSCOW, Russia – Russia’s Yelena Serova on Thursday, September 25, prepared to become the first woman cosmonaut in 17 years – but only after having to answer questions about her hairstyle and whether her daughter would cope while she was away.

The 38-year-old space engineer, with dark hair pulled into a tight bun and a strong resolute face, has spent 7 years preparing for the role and her husband is also a former trainee cosmonaut.

She is due to blast off in a Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 20:25 GMT Thursday with Russian cosmonaut Alexander Samokutyaev and Barry Wilmore of NASA.

While the Soviet Union was the first to send a woman into space – Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 – it failed to build on that promising start and bring equality to the ranks. Serova will be just the 4th Soviet or Russian woman in space.

Serova has faced a volley of questions focusing on her gender and how she will manage to bond with her 11-year-old daughter while she is away.

She even offered to give a demonstration of washing her hair in space.

But her patience appeared to run out at a pre-launch press conference Wednesday in Baikonur when a journalist asked her to comment again on how she’d look after her hair aboard the ISS and whether she would keep her current style.

“Can I ask a question, too: Aren’t you interested in the hair styles of my colleagues?” she asked at the televised news conference, flanked by the male astronauts who will accompany her.

She stressed: “My flight is my job.”

“I’ll be the first Russian woman who will fly to the ISS. I feel a huge responsibility towards the people who taught and trained us and I want to tell them: We won’t let you down!”

‘Men’s work’

Just 3 Soviet or Russian women have been in space: Tereshkova, Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982 and 1984, and Yelena Kondakova in 1994 and 1997, making her second voyage on the US shuttle Atlantis.

The Soviet Union wanted to win the space race with Tereshkova but then rejected the use of women for many years because they were seen as not physically strong enough, said Igor Marinin, the editor of Russian magazine Space News.

“In space, it’s men’s work. The leadership then were military, they decided not to take women as cosmonauts any more,” he said.

The choice of Serova was made personally by the then head of Russia’s space agency, Vladimir Popovkin, Marinin said.

“We are doing this flight for Russia’s image,” he said. “She will manage it, but the next woman won’t fly out soon.”

He voiced concerns over the gender balance, saying: “Six months with five men in a confined space is complicated. Lena is a charming, attractive woman.”

The ISS has seen its share of female astronauts however, most recently American flight engineer Karen Nyberg, who completed a six month stint last year.

Serova was born in a village in far eastern Russia and studied engineering at the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute. Before being selected as a future cosmonaut in 2006, she worked as an engineer at the spaceship manufacturers RKK Energia and at the mission control centre.

The Russian company that DESIGNS CLOTHES for astronauts announced she would have outfits in 15 different colours — albeit rather unglamourously, each one has to be worn three days in a row.

“We had to make her socks specially… because she has such little feet. On each sock, we wrote Yelena,” revealed the company’s general director, Alexander Yarov, to Interfax.

The 54-year-old British singer Sarah Brightman is set to travel to the ISS as a space tourist in 2015. – Rappler.com