Valentina Tereshkova

Valentina Tereshkova (Russian: Валенти́на Терешко́ва; born 6th March 1937) was the first woman to go into space, the tenth human, and the sixth cosmonaut. She launched in Vostok 6 on 16th June 1963 and spent almost three days orbiting Earth before safely returning. An engineer by training, Tereshkova was one of over 400 applicants to apply for the mission.

Background

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was born on 6th March 1937 in Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a village in the Yaroslavl Oblast region of Russia. Her father was a tractor driver and her mother worked in a textile plant. Tereshkova initially followed her mother into the textile industry, but also joined a parachuting club. At the age of 24, she applied to become a cosmonaut. At the time, while male cosmonauts such as Yuri Gagarin had come from a piloting background, few women flew planes, so parachutists were sought instead.

Space flight

Tereshkova's flight co-incided with that of Vostok 5, crewed by Valeriy Bykovsky, which had launched two days earlier, on 14th June 1963. On the 16th, Tereshkova took off at the beginning of a mission that had until then been shrouded in secrecy, to the point that she had had to keep what she was doing from her family. Tereshkova reached orbit and exchanged brief communications with Bykovsky as they brought their spacecraft within 3 miles (5km) of each other. Tereshkova went on to achieve 48 orbits before safely returning to Earth after a mission that had lasted 70 hours and 50 minutes, longer than all those of the U.S. Mercury programme combined.

Aftermath

Tereshkova never returned to space, instead devoting the rest of her career to engineering and government work. She had one daughter with fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev, from whom she was later divorced. She became a member of the Soviet Union's national parliament and published many academic papers up until her retirement.

Legacy

It was two decades before another woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, went into space in 1982, followed by the first female U.S. astronaut, Sally Ride, in 1983. Although the Soviet female cosmonaut programme had been disbanded in 1969, Tereshkova holds the achievement of being the first of many women to go into space, especially since the 1980s.