Maryna Vitaleuna Vasileuskaya (Belarusian: Марына Віталеўна Васілеўская; born 14 September 1990) is a flight instructor and flight attendant for Belavia Airlines in Belarus.[3][4][5][1] She is the first Belarusian woman to be launched into space.[6][7]
Maryna Vasileuskaya | |
|---|---|
Марина Василевская | |
.jpg) | |
| Born | 14 September 1990 |
| Occupation(s) | Flight instructor, flight attendant |
| Organization(s) | Belavia |
| Space career | |
| Belarus Space Agency cosmonaut | |
Time in space | 13 days, 18 hours and 41 minutes |
| Missions | Soyuz MS-25/MS-24[1][2] |
Biography
Maryna Vasileuskaya graduated from secondary school No. 151 in Minsk.[8] She is a flight instructor and flight attendant for Belavia Airlines, working on the crews of Boeing and Embraer aircraft.[9][3] She started dancing around 2002, when she was 12.[7] Soon after completing school, she practiced ballroom dancing professionally for 15 years before joining the airline.[10][11] She is passionate about interior design, she enjoys going to the swimming pool, doing aerobics, playing badminton and tennis in her free time, as well as gardening.[3][5][7]
Space mission
In December 2022, during a competitive selection held in Belarus, she was selected among six applicants from more than three thousand women to participate in a space flight under the "Belarusian Woman in Space" project on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to ISS for a short duration mission.[12][13] This contest was organised by Belarus Academy of Sciences. The other five were another flight attendant, two doctors, and two scientists.[7]
.jpg)
In May 2023, she was one of the two remaining candidates (Anastasia Lenkova, being the other selected as her backup) following the Belarus Space Agency selection to fly aboard Soyuz MS-25 as a spaceflight participant in March 2024.[14][15][16] She was designated as a member of prime crew of ISS EP-21.
On 24 July 2023, she commenced theoretical and practical training for the flight at the Yuri A. Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.[17] In October, she began practical training on the Soyuz MS spacecraft simulator to conduct routine flight and undocking operations,[18] and underwent training in zero gravity conditions on the Ilyushin II-76 laboratory aircraft.[19] In December, together with Oleg Novitsky, she conducted training on the actions of astronauts in the event of an emergency landing in a wooded and swampy area in winter. She isn't trained for US Orbital Segment as she only worked on the Russian Orbital Segment of ISS.[20]
She traveled to the station with Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky and NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell-Dyson, where she and Oleg spent approximately 13 days aboard the orbital complex as a part of 21st ISS visiting expedition.[21][1][22] After spending those 13 days on the International Space Station, she and Oleg returned to Earth aboard the Soyuz MS-24 with NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara on 6 April 2024.[21][3][16][5][7]