Vostok

Blue Origin says the last all-female spaceflight was over 60 years ago when Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space on a solo mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6.

"Our knowledge of subglacial lacustrine environments has hinged largely on satellite measurements and radar mapping," Bell said, noting that the under-ice Lake Vostok – first suggested by Soviet sounding studies in the 1950s and 1960s – was at last confirmed in 1993 using laser altimetry from the European Remote Sensing-1 satellite.

Lake Vostok is roughly 34 million years old, but Bell is among the researchers who have suggested water circulated through the microbe-filled lake roughly every 50,000 years.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Viktoria Abramchenko was quoted as saying this month that construction on the Soyuz Vostok gas pipeline, the Mongolian portion of Power of Siberia-2, could start in the first half of next year.

Vostok station is a Russian weather station in Antarctica.