Russia will assign 36-year-old Yelena Serova to the International Space Station in 2014. However, she will not perform a space walk but would concentrate on research.

Ms Serova would be the first cosmonaut that Russia will deploy in 20 years, although she would be the third Russian woman in space.

The first is Valentina Tereshkova who flew into space on June 16, 1963. Ms Serova's deployment is part of the 50th anniversary of Ms Tereshkova's sojourn into space.

The second is Svetlana Savitskaya, who made history by becoming the first woman to do a space walk.

The last Russian female to fly to space in the early 1980s was Yelena Kondakova who was assigned for five months in the Mir station in 1994 and 1995. In 1997, Ms Kondakova traveled aboard the US Space Shuttle.

NASA has been sending female astronauts to the ISS and created a NASA Space Teacher in Space Project, and one of them, teacher Christa McAuliffe, perished when the space ship Challenger exploded upon take off in 1986.

Alexander Temerov, an official of Russia's Star City space training centre, said Mr Serova will be assigned at the ISS for six months.

Another Russian woman, Anna Kikina, 28, is going through the cosmonaut programme, one of the eight picked a recruitment drive in 2012.

Interest in space trips has heightened that even a porn star, Coco Brown, is undergoing space training and promised not to do triple X-rate movies while in outer space. That would make her the first porn star in space among real galactic stars.

Dennis Tito, the world's first space tourist, is organising a 501-day journey to Mars in 2018 and plans to send an elderly male and female pair on a space craft yet to be built, but will be covered by dehydrated human feces to serve as protection against radiation in outer space.

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