Her father, Yevgeny Savitsky, was a highly decorated fighter pilot during the Second World War, which later brought him to the position of Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Air Defense.

Her father realized her secret extracurricular activity upon the discovery of a parachute knife in his daughter's school bag.

An experienced and highly educated female in the Soviet Space Program, Savitskaya was reportedly an extremely serious, unbending, and steely woman.

[1] The groups' training was announced during French Air force officer and astronaut Jean-Loup Chretien's space mission.

[4] The mission of this second visiting expedition of the Salyut 7 was to prove the Soviet superiority to America by flying another woman into space and to replace the Soyuz T-5 spacecraft, which the crew would use for their return, with a new vehicle.

Savitskaya was assigned the orbital module of Soyuz T-7 as a private area, but slept as well as the men in the space station.

[5] The timing of her mission would become one of her last triumphs to further the Soviet propaganda agenda in performing the first woman's spacewalk ahead of the Americans.

Savitskaya was chosen above other female cosmonauts due to her extensive flight experience and physical ability to perform the necessary operations in a heavy, bulky space suit for multiple hours.

On July 17, 1984, Savitskaya launched aboard Soyuz T-12, together with Commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov and research cosmonaut Igor Volk.

[4] Upon returning to Earth, Savitskaya was assigned as the commander of an all-female Soyuz crew to Salyut 7 in commemoration of International Women's Day.

[1] In February 1985, however, the radio contact with Salyut 7 was lost; the space station was rescued by the Soyuz T-13 mission in the summer of 1985.

When the next mission had to be stopped in November 1985, due to an illness of the commander Vladimir Vasyutin, the women's flight was finally canceled.

In 1996, she was elected a deputy of the State Duma representing the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and has been re-elected four times since then.

She presently serves as Deputy Chair of the Committee on Defence, and is also a member of the Coordination council presidium of the National Patriotic Union.