1963
First Woman In Space
On June 16, 1963, aboard Vostok 6, Soviet Cosmonaut
Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman to travel into space. After 48
orbits and 71 hours, she returned to earth, having spent more time in space
than all U.S. astronauts combined to that date.
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was born to a peasant family
in Maslennikovo, Russia, in 1937. She began work at a textile factory when she
was 18, and at age 22 she made her first parachute jump under the auspices of a
local aviation club. Her enthusiasm for skydiving brought her to the attention
of the Soviet space program, which sought to put a woman in space in the early
1960s as a means of achieving another “space first” before the United States.
As an accomplished parachutist, Tereshkova was well equipped to handle one of
the most challenging procedures of a Vostok space flight: the mandatory
ejection from the capsule at about 20,000 feet during reentry. In February
1962, she was selected along with three other woman parachutists and a female
pilot to begin intensive training to become a cosmonaut.
In 1963, Tereshkova was chosen to take part in the second dual
flight in the Vostok program, involving spacecrafts Vostok 5 and Vostok
6. On June 14, 1963, Vostok 5 was launched into space with cosmonaut
Valeri Bykovsky aboard. With Bykovsky still orbiting the earth, Tereshkova was
launched into space on June 16 aboard Vostok 6. The two spacecrafts had
different orbits but at one point came within three miles of each other,
allowing the two cosmonauts to exchange brief communications. Tereshkova’s
spacecraft was guided by an automatic control system, and she never took manual
control. On June 19, after just under three days in space, Vostok 6
reentered the atmosphere, and Tereshkova successfully parachuted to earth after
ejecting at 20,000 feet. Bykovsky and Vostok 5 landed safely a few hours
later.
After her historic space flight, Valentina Tereshkova received
the Order of Lenin and Hero of the Soviet Union awards. In November 1963, she
married fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev, reportedly under pressure from
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who saw a propaganda advantage in the pairing
of the two single cosmonauts. The couple made several goodwill trips abroad,
had a daughter, and later separated. In 1966, Tereshkova became a member of the
Supreme Soviet, the USSR’s national parliament, and she served as the Soviet
representative to numerous international women’s organizations and events. She
never entered space again, and hers was the last space flight by a female
cosmonaut until the 1980s.
The United States screened a group of female pilots in 1959 and
1960 for possible astronaut training but later decided to restrict astronaut
qualification to men. The first American woman in space was astronaut and
physicist Sally Ride, who served as mission specialist on a flight of the space
shuttle Challenger in 1983.