MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th May, 2021) Anna Kikina, the only active female cosmonaut in the Russian space team, will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) in fall 2022, the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center said on Monday.
In April, a source told Sputnik that Dmitry Rogozin, the chief of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, ordered that Kikina be prepared for a flight to the ISS in 2022.
Kikina will be a member of the 68th ISS expedition along with Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin. In 2012, she became a candidate for cosmonaut after passing the first open selection. In 2014, she was enrolled in the cosmonaut team after two years of training. Three years later, Kikina took part in the SIRIUS international experiment that imitated a flight to the Moon.
Only four Soviet and Russian female cosmonauts, including Valentina Tereshkova, Svetlana Savitskaya, Elena Kondakova and Elena Serova, have so far been to space.
