The most qualified female cosmonaut candidate, grounded by politics
She told Tereshkova, 'The Komsomol and the party have irreparably spoiled you,' Kamanin recorded in his diary.
A Moscow Aviation Institute graduate and the only pilot among the five women selected for the cosmonaut corps in 1962, she scored highest on her final exams, and medical director Yazdovsky ranked her first for flight. But Kamanin recorded her independent manner as 'arrogance,' her smoking and drinking as 'moral instability,' and Korolev told her a working-class woman was needed for the flight, so Tereshkova was chosen. She later trained for an all-female Voskhod mission with a spacewalk, but the program was cancelled, and she never flew.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1951–57Graduated Moscow girls' school No. 156 with gold medal; Moscow Aviation Institute (liquid rocket engines)
- 1957–62Assigned to OKB-1, then researcher at Academy of Sciences Applied Mathematics Division under Keldysh
- 1962.4Selected for women's cosmonaut group (5); enlisted in Soviet Air Force
- 1962–63Vostok-6 training; highest exam score; assigned second backup to Tereshkova
- 1965–66Trained for Voskhod-4 female spacewalk mission (cancelled)
- 1969–88Senior researcher at Gagarin Training Center; taught orbital mechanics to cosmonauts
- 1988–2023Senior researcher at Institute of History of Natural Science and Technology, RAS; head of cosmonautics history group
Related historical events
Selection for the women’s cosmonaut group and exclusion from flight
Ponomaryova was selected in February 1962 as one of five women candidates for spaceflight and trained for Vostok missions. When Tereshkova was designated for Vostok 6 in May 1963, Ponomaryova and Irina Solovyova were named as backups. The women candidates were expected to have opportunities on later missions, but the Vostok program ended after Tereshkova’s flight. Nikolai Kamanin’s diary records a proposal to assign Solovyova and Ponomaryova to an all-female spacewalk mission. The mission was pursued as part of the Voskhod program but was never flown. Ponomaryova was therefore selected and trained as a cosmonaut candidate, but never made a spaceflight.