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Irina Solovyova
Born in the Tula region in 1937.
Graduated from the Constraction faculty
of the Ural Polytechnic Institute.
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From her youth, Irina Solovyova was skydiving, and thus she got into astronautics. In 1963, she was preparing for a flight on the Vostok-6 spacecraft as the backup to Valentina Tereshkova. A few reasons influenced choosing Tereshkova as the first woman-cosmonaut. Tereshkova was from a working-class family, while Solovyova was from the family of the office-workers. Tereshkova's father died during the Soviet-Finnish war. After the flight into space, she asked to find the place of his death as a gratitude from the government. Khrushchev's personal sympathy for Tereshkova and a touching family story put Irina Solovyova aside.
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My Personal Cosmos exhibition displays Irina Solovyova's shirt presented to her in Star City. Embroidered 2000 symbolizes the number of parachute jumps that Solovyova made having a big dream that turned into the unfulfilled hope of the first woman to go into space.