We know the names of the first men in space, and on the Moon, but have you thought about the first woman?

Soviet cosmonaut, Ms. Valentina Tereshkova is the first woman to travel in space. On 16 June 1963, Ms. Tereshkova was launched on a solo mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6.

She spent more than 70 hours orbiting the Earth, two years after Mr. Yuri Gagarin’s first human-crewed flight in space.

Ms. Tereshkova was born on 6 March 1937 in the village of Bolshoye Maslennikovo in central Russia. Her mother was a textile worker, and her father was a tractor driver who was later recognized as a war hero during World War Two.

After leaving school, Ms. Tereshkova followed her mother into work at a textile factory. According to the reports, “Her first appreciation of flying was going down rather than up when she joined a local skydiving and parachutist club. It was her hobby of jumping out of planes that appealed to the Soviets’ space program committee.”

On applying to the cosmonaut corps, Ms. Tereshkova was eventually chosen from more than 400 other candidates. Ms. Tereshkova received 18 months of severe training with the Soviet Air Force after her selection. These tests studied her abilities to cope physically under the extremes of gravity, as well as handle challenges such as emergency management and the isolation of being in space alone.

At 24 years old, she was honorably inducted into the Soviet Air Force. Ms. Tereshkova still holds the title as the youngest woman, and the first civilian to fly in space, as per the reports.

While Ms. Tereshkova remains the only woman to have flown solo in space, her mission was a dual flight. Fellow cosmonaut Mr. Valeriy Bykovsky launched on Vostok 5 on 14 June 1963.

Reports reveal that, “The two spacecraft took different flight paths and came within three miles of each other. The cosmonauts exchanged communications while making 48 orbits of Earth, with Mr. Tereshkova responding to Mr. Bykovsky via her callsign ‘Seagull’.”

In her later life, Ms. Tereshkova was decorated with prestigious medals and has held several prominent political positions both for the Russian and global councils. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, she was an official head of State and was elected a member of the World Peace Council in 1966.

FIRST SPACE WOMAN

Ms. Helen Patricia Sharman became the first British astronaut in space and the first woman to visit the Mir space station in 1991.

Ms. Sharman was selected as one of only two candidates to undertake the full-time astronaut training at Moscow’s Star City. The space program was known as Project Juno and was a collaboration between the Soviet Union and British space programs.

Ms. Mae Carol Jemison became the first African American woman in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on 12 September 1992 and Ms. Sally Ride was the first American woman to enter space, piloting the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983.

Furthermore, Ms. Kalpana Chawla was the first woman of Indian origin to go to space and the second person from India to fly in space. Chawla served in NASA as a mission specialist and robotic arm operator on the Space Shuttle Columbia. The flight launched on 17 November 1997, and she remained in space for 15 days and 12 hours.

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