With Russia's first post-Soviet female cosmonaut, Yelena Serova, set to take part in a mission to the International Space Station this month, a second woman could make the same trip further down the line after being reinstated to the training program.
Anna Kikina, 29, was kicked out of the training course on June 16 — exactly 51 years after the Soviet Union sent the world's first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, into space — after she failed a stage-one test. But she was later allowed to retake the test and passed, Interfax reported.
"Now [Kikina] needs to move onto group training, and then she will be assigned to a crew," the commander of the Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, Yury Lonchakov, said Wednesday, TASS reported.
Lonchakov said that her instructors had given her high marks for the first stage this time around, and that she will likely be flown to the station in three or four years.
