Svetlana Savitskaya

Svetlana Savitskaya: First Woman to Walk in Space

On 25 July 1984, a Soviet engineer floated out of the airlock of the Salyut 7 station carrying a device called the Universal Hand Tool and spent three hours and thirty-five minutes cutting titanium, welding stainless steel and depositing aluminium coatings in vacuum. Svetlana Savitskaya had just become the first woman to perform a spacewalk. NASA had already announced that Kathy Sullivan would do it; the Soviet programme beat the Americans to the milestone by design — and it chose, for the job, the only test pilot in its female cosmonaut group.

The General's Daughter

She was born on 8 August 1948 into the aristocracy of Soviet air power. Her father, Yevgeny Savitsky, was a highly decorated fighter pilot of the Second World War who rose to become Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Air Defense. Her mother was a Communist Party leader in Moscow. It was, on paper, the perfect launching pad — which makes what she actually did with her adolescence more revealing.

At sixteen she began parachuting without telling her parents. By her seventeenth birthday she had made 450 jumps. Her father found out the way fathers do: he discovered a parachute knife in his daughter's school bag. Having discovered it, he backed her. She went on to set three world records for stratosphere jumps, from 13,800 and 14,250 metres, and fifteen world records for jumps from jet aircraft.

Records in the Air

In 1970 she flew a Yak-18 as part of an all-female Soviet team that won the FAI World Aerobatic Championship. She qualified as a flight instructor in 1971 and graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1972. She was competing in a Yak-50 by 1976, the same year she completed the Fedotov Test Pilot School and received the Order of the Badge of Honour. In 1978 she joined the Yakovlev design bureau as a test pilot — one of very few women in the Soviet Union permitted to fly experimental aircraft as a profession. She became the first woman to reach 2,683 km/h, in a MiG-25.

This is the part of her record that is usually skipped over, and it matters. Savitskaya was not selected as a symbolic passenger. By the time she was recruited, she was a working test pilot with a wall of aeronautical world records and a doctorate that would later come from the Moscow Higher Technical School.

Cosmonaut

She was chosen on 30 June 1980, one of nine women taken into the cosmonaut corps and the only test pilot among them. Her first flight, Soyuz T-7, launched on 19 August 1982 and docked with Salyut 7. She spent 7 days, 21 hours and 52 minutes in orbit and returned as the second woman in space — nineteen years after Valentina Tereshkova, a gap that says a great deal about how seriously the Soviet programme had taken its own precedent. The mission's stated aim was blunt: to demonstrate Soviet superiority over America by flying another woman into space, ahead of Sally Ride's scheduled flight.

Outside the Airlock

The second mission was more pointed still. NASA had publicly announced that Kathy Sullivan would perform an EVA before Savitskaya's own extravehicular assignment was confirmed in December 1983. Soyuz T-12 launched on 17 July 1984, and eight days later Savitskaya went outside.

The spacewalk was not ceremonial. She operated the Universal Hand Tool — a device designed to cut, solder, weld and braze in the vacuum of space — completing six cuts through titanium and stainless steel, applying two aluminium coatings, and running a series of soldering tests. It was, in engineering terms, one of the first serious attempts to establish whether metalworking could be done in orbit at all. She was awarded Hero of the Soviet Union for the second time; she had already received the title, and the Order of Lenin, for the 1982 flight.

After the Flag

From 1983 to 1994 Savitskaya served as Deputy Head of NPO Energia, the design bureau at the centre of the Soviet space effort. She was elected a USSR people's deputy in 1989 and a Russian people's deputy from 1990 to 1992, retiring from the Russian Air Force in 1993 with the rank of Major. In 1996 she entered the State Duma as a deputy for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and has been re-elected four times, serving as Deputy Chair of the Committee on Defence. She has not softened her politics with age: of the collapse of the Soviet Union she remarked that her parents would suffer a "second death" if they could see post-Soviet Russia. She married and has a son, Konstantin, born on 7 November 1986.

Why Svetlana Is Called a Genius

The word sits awkwardly on Savitskaya, and it is worth being precise about why. Her achievement was not a discovery or a theory; it was the accumulation of an extraordinarily rare combination of capabilities in one person. She was simultaneously a record-setting parachutist, a world-champion aerobatic pilot, a graduate aeronautical engineer, a qualified experimental test pilot who took a MiG-25 past 2,683 km/h, and a cosmonaut who performed skilled metallurgical work in a pressure suit. Each of those is a full career. Holding all of them requires a specific kind of intelligence — spatial, procedural, physiological, executed under conditions where an error of judgment is fatal and where there is no opportunity to think twice. The URI welding trials she conducted in 1984 were genuine engineering research, not photo opportunities, and she was the only member of the female cosmonaut group qualified to run them.

The honest counter-case is that Savitskaya's gifts were applied, not original. She designed no spacecraft and formulated no theory; her records are performance records. Her opportunity, moreover, was manufactured by a state that wanted a propaganda victory over NASA and had a general's daughter conveniently available — a fact her critics have never let go of, and one the timing of both flights makes impossible to deny. What the record does show is that the Soviet Union, having decided to make a political point, picked the one woman in the programme who could actually do the technical work. Being the instrument of a propaganda decision and being outstandingly competent are not mutually exclusive. Savitskaya was both.

Legacy

Her honours are among the densest of any aviator: twice Hero of the Soviet Union, in 1982 and 1984; two Orders of Lenin; the Order of the Badge of Honour in 1976; the Medal "For Merit in Space Exploration" in 2011; gold medals from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and sixteen from Soviet sporting bodies. She was made an Honorary Citizen of Baikonur in 1982, was one of five cosmonauts who carried the Russian flag into the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and has an asteroid — 4118 Sveta — named after her. Nearly every woman who has since worked outside a spacecraft has done so through a door Savitskaya opened, wearing a suit and holding a tool.