Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Helen Sharman’s two male companions aboard the Soyuz-TM transporter
would have preferred to have had another man on board, says Aleksei Leonov,
deputy head of the Gagarin Cosmonauts’ Training Centre. In a radio interview,
Leonov said Sharman had coped with the training programme better than most
men. But her fellow cosmonauts had a very sensitive attitude to women and,
in their own words, had ‘got fed up’ with having to adapt to women – ‘who
are uniquely Earth creatures’.

Interviewed on the same programme, Sharman said that gender makes no
difference in space. But the interviewer disagreed, mentioning ‘problems
of hygiene’.

This question never arose for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman
cosmonaut, because she rode solo in her own craft. Nor did it seem a problem
for Svetlana Savitskaya, when she travelled to the Salyut space station
in 1982.

Sharman firmly rejected the Soviet interviewer’s suggestion that her
role aboard Mir might be that of cook. ‘Just because I’m a woman does not
mean I have to deal with everything to do with food,’ she retorted (in Russian).