By checking biographies on the NASA website, and by the process of elimination, she determined that this was Tekla Alekseyevna Ilyushina. She was a test pilot. She had competed in the most recent Olympics as a heptathlete and taken a bronze medal. As such she might have had glorious career options as a propaganda idol during the old Soviet days. But the recent conservative drift of Russian culture had left few slots available for women in male-dominated professions such as the military or the space program. Consequently much of her work experience had been outside of Russia, working for privately funded aerospace companies. She had returned a few years ago to become one of two active female cosmonauts. Dinah was cynical enough to see politics as the basis of that; in order for Roskosmos to remain on speaking terms with NASA and the European Space Agency, they had to have at least one or two females qualified to go into space.