The First Woman in Space: Valentina Tereshkova, 1963
1963 · event
On 16 June 1963 a twenty six year old textile worker from a village on the Volga was launched into orbit aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6. Valentina Tereshkova spent almost three days in space and circled the Earth forty eight times, which was more time in orbit than every American astronaut who had flown up to that date, added together. Her call sign was Chaika, the seagull, and it is how the Soviet public knew her.
Tereshkova had not come from military aviation, the usual route into the early space programme. She worked in a mill, had joined a local flying club and had made over a hundred parachute jumps, which mattered because Vostok cosmonauts ejected from the capsule and landed by parachute. She was chosen from a small group of women recruited in 1962 and trained for a year.
The flight had a difficult moment. An error in the automatic programme would have raised her orbit instead of lowering it, and the correct data was transmitted from the ground in time for reentry. She reported the problem, which was kept quiet for many years, and she landed safely in the Altai region.
No other woman flew in space for nineteen years, until Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982, and none in the American programme until 1983. Tereshkova became a public figure, an engineer and later a member of the Russian parliament. Her flight is remembered as a genuine first and, at the same time, as a reminder of how long it then took for the door she opened to be used again.