The First Woman Beyond the Atmosphere

On June 16, 1963, at 12:29 PM Moscow time, a modified R-7 rocket lifted off from Baikonur carrying Vostok 6 and 26-year-old Valentina Tereshkova. Call sign: Chaika -- Seagull. Three days later, after 48 orbits, she became the first woman in space. It would be 19 years before another woman followed.

Tereshkova was not a pilot. She was a textile worker from Yaroslavl who had taken up parachuting, logging 126 jumps. The Soviets wanted another first after Gagarin and needed someone who could handle the Vostok's ejection-seat landing. Out of 400 applicants, five women were selected. Tereshkova emerged at the top.

The flight was harder than expected. She experienced nausea and discovered an orientation error that would have sent her deeper into space. She reported it; ground control uploaded a correction. After nearly three days -- longer than all American Mercury missions combined -- she ejected at 7,000 meters and parachuted to the Altai region.

a vostok spacecraft capsule, identical in type to the one that carried tereshkova into orbit in 1963. source: wikimedia commons

The Soviet Union celebrated her, but no Soviet woman flew again until Savitskaya in 1982. Her flight was as much political gesture as milestone, but the milestone was real. When Sally Ride became the first American woman in space 20 years later, the path was already cleared. Tereshkova remains the only woman to have completed a solo space mission. She flew alone, in a capsule barely larger than a telephone booth, for 70 hours and 50 minutes. The sky was never the same.