A textile worker flew the only solo woman space mission
Valentina Tereshkova, born 6 March 1937, became the first woman in space aboard Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. Twenty-six at launch, she circled Earth forty-eight times in nearly three days—still the only woman to fly a space mission alone, and the last surviving Vostok cosmonaut.
She was born in Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a Volga village about 270 kilometres north-east of Moscow in Yaroslavl Oblast, to parents who had moved from Belarus; her father had been a tractor driver. Starting school at eight and leaving at sixteen, she worked in a tyre factory and then a textile mill while finishing correspondence courses at a light-industry technical school in 1960. She took up parachuting young, and it was skydiving rather than any stated wish to fly in space that got her chosen.
After Gagarin’s 1961 flight, the training chief Nikolai Kamanin read that American women pilots were preparing for space and pushed for a Soviet female group. Lacking military backgrounds, the recruits began as Air Force privates and endured isolation, centrifuge, heat-chamber and decompression tests, jet training in MiG-15UTIs and sea recovery drills. An early plan to fly two women on consecutive days was dropped.
Vostok 6, the last of its series, followed Valery Bykovsky’s Vostok 5 by two days. On her first orbit the two craft passed within about 5 kilometres and spoke by radio. Her call sign was Seagull, and in one flight she logged more hours than every American astronaut before her combined, supplying data on how spaceflight affects women despite bouts of nausea. On 19 June she ejected about four miles up, fought gusty winds under her parachute, bruised her nose landing north-east of Karaganda, and ate dinner with villagers who helped her out of her suit.
Khrushchev greeted her in Moscow on 22 June, and two days later about 2,000 women from 119 countries hailed her at an international congress. She later taught cosmonauts, graduated from the Zhukovsky academy and sat on the Supreme Soviet’s Presidium from 1974 to 1989. In 2022 her vote backing the invasion of Ukraine brought international sanctions.
Source: Valentina Tereshkova
