Women in Space

Women Space Firsts: A Footnote to History
Tereshkova, Savitskaya, Ride, Sullivan
FIRST EVA BY A WOMAN OF THE UNITED STATES

STS-41G Emblem

There probably was no formal declaration of the space race, but from the time the first manmade object was put into orbit around the earth by the U.S.S.R, each 'first' was recorded and placed in someone's record book. There are all sorts of firsts: first living creature in space, first man to orbit the earth, first man to perform an EVA and so on. A brief review of the firsts credited to women is given here with a personal account related to one of them.

On June 16, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to orbit the earth. She flew in Vostok-6 launched by the U.S.S.R. According to the source at the link here, "she was not permitted to take manual control of the spacecraft as had been planned. Mishin later claimed she was 'on the edge of psychological instability'. Whatever the case, Valentina completed three days in space, more than the flight time of all the American astronauts put together."

Valentina had the opportunity to fly into space for political and social reasons and it was not until almost 20 years later that another woman flew into space. She was Svetlana Savitskaya . On August 19, 1982, she flew on Soyuz T-7 with Leonid Popov and Aleksandr Serebrov. According to the source " She was selected . . ., as part of a female team selected to upstage pending female astronaut flights on the space shuttle. She became the second woman in space . . ., seven months before Sally Ride became the first American female astronaut in space . . ."

On June 18,1983 Sally Ride became the first American woman to orbit Earth when she flew aboard Space Shuttle Challenger.

PHOTO CREDITS: NASA

Kathy Sullivan was the first female astronaut to go through the vacuum chamber spacesuit training program required for performing an EVA. I think I was involved in one way or another with all her training runs. When she entered the EVA training program, the prebreathe for men was three hours. However, the conventional wisdom was that women, because of their extra body fat, needed a longer prebreathe and that was set at an additional hour. Kathy gamely accepted the four-hour prebreathe followed by the usual time at vacuum. It made an all day operation with 6 to 7 hours in the suit with nothing to eat or drink but a fruit bar and water from a plastic bag in the suit at body temperature. (A special undergarment had been developed for the women to wear. It was a high-tech version of those now worn to protect from incontinence.) I remember that I was the test director for the first run she made. The photos on the left show Astronaut Kathy Thornton preparing for her first vacuum suit test. It is representative of the first vacuum chamber suit test that Kathy Sullivan participated in. The right photo shows Kathy Sullivan in our Shuttle Airlock test compartment preparing for her training test of suit and airlock operations to get from normal conditions to vacuum operation.

A special prebreathe protocol had been developed for Shuttle operations. The crew members scheduled for the EVA prebreathed for one hour using oxygen masks then the Shuttle cabin pressure was reduced to 10.2 psia for 24 hours. Thus the crew could sleep during part of the prebreathe then don the suits after 24 hours. A final 75-minute prebreathe in the suits completed the prebreathe requirement.

Even though it was not mandatory, Kathy said that she would do another run using the '10.2 over-night' protocol. I was test director on the shift that got her settled into the chamber during the evening and got the chamber stabilized at 10.2 psia for the over-night sleep period.

Sally Ride and Kathy were scheduled to fly on STS-41G. That would make Sally the first woman in the world to fly in space twice and Kathy would be the first woman in the world to do an EVA. (It may have been the first flight with two women aboard.) We all were hoping the flight would be successful and so that we would be part of a world first. However, on July 25, 1984, Svetlana took both records: the first woman to fly twice in space and the first woman to do an EVA. Her EVA lasted 3.58 hours and was part of the Soyuz T-12 mission.

Kathy was at our facility for additional training after those records had been set and I told her that I had really hoped that she would have been the first woman to do an EVA. She said that if only the US space program hadn't been so open, the Russians wouldn't have known to plan to beat us to those two records. She was obviously disappointed. She went on to fly several missions. Svetlana didn't fly again.

Kathy's first mission, STS-41G, launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on October 5, 1984. Kathy and Dave Leestma conducted a 3-1/2 hour EVA to demonstrate the feasibility of actual satellite refueling, making her the first U.S. woman to perform an EVA. STS-41G completed 132 orbits of the Earth in 197.5 hours.

PHOTO CREDITS: NASA
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