Svetlana Savitskaya Svetlana Savitskaya Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya (; born 8 August 1948) is a retired Soviet aviator and cosmonaut who flew aboard Soyuz T-7 in 1982, becoming the second woman in space. On her 1984 mission she became the first woman to fly to space twice, and the first woman to perform a spacewalk. She set several FAI world records as a pilot. Svetlana Savitskaya was born in a privileged family. Her father, Yevgeniy Savitskiy, was a highly decorated fighter pilot during the Second World War, which later brought him to the position of Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Air Defense. Without the
Bulgarian cosmonaut program developed for Aleksandrov's flight are now used on the International Space Station and on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. The Bulgarian SVET plant growth system later installed on the Mir was used to grow wheat and vegetables in space for the first time. After the collapse of Communism and the severe reduction of science funding, Bulgaria's cosmonaut programme was largely shelved. Much of the infrastructure became defunct. In 2011, Georgi Ivanov urged the government to reboot the human spaceflight programme. Krasimir Stoyanov has suggested that domestic plant growth and radiation monitoring equipment could allow a Bulgarian cosmonaut to join a