Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya
Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya is a Soviet aviator, test pilot, engineer, and cosmonaut whose two Salyut 7 missions made her one of the defining figures in women's spaceflight history. She became the second woman in space, the first woman to visit a , the first woman to fly in space twice, and the first woman to perform a .
- Born
- August 8, 1948
- Died
- N/A
- Birthplace
- Moscow,Soviet Union
Flights
2
Spacewalks
1
EVA time
3 hours, 35 minutes
In space
19 days, 17 hours, 6 minutes
Bio
Savitskaya grew up in Moscow in an aviation family and entered high-performance flight through parachuting, aerobatics, and test-pilot work. Before cosmonaut selection, she set aviation records and flew jet aircraft, giving her career more in common with the Soviet test-pilot tradition than with a symbolic passenger assignment.
Her first flight was the Soyuz T-7 visiting mission to Salyut 7 in August 1982. She launched with Leonid Popov and Aleksandr Serebrov, worked aboard the station with the resident crew, and returned on Soyuz T-5 after the visiting crew exchanged spacecraft with the long-duration crew.
Savitskaya returned on Soyuz T-12 in July 1984 with Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Igor Volk. During that mission, she and Dzhanibekov performed an EVA outside Salyut 7, testing cutting, welding, soldering, and coating tools for orbital construction and repair.