VALENTINA TERESHKOVA
"Once you've been in space, you appreciate how small and fragile the Earth is."
Valentina Vladimirovna “Valya” Tereshkova was born on March 6, 1937, in a small village called Maslennikovo, northeast of Moscow. Valentina was the middle child with a sister named Ludmila and a brother named Vladimir. Her parents were collective farmers. When Valentina was two years old, her father was killed in action during World War II. When she was 16 years old, Valentina had to drop out of school to work at a textile factory with her mother. She continued schooling through correspondence courses and eventually graduated from the Light Industry Technical School. At this time, Valentina had also developed an interest in parachute jumping and was training at a local aeroclub, a fact she kept secret from her family. She took her first of 126 jumps on May 21st, 1959, when she was 22 years old. In 1961, Valentina became secretary of
the local Komsomol (Young Communist League) and later joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Inspired by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space in the year 1961, Valentina volunteered for the Soviet space program. Although she did not have any training as a pilot, Valentina was accepted as one of 5 female trainees, owing to her parachuting experience and her proletarian background. After 18 months of training, Valentina was selected to pilot the Vostok 6. It was a joint mission with cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky, wherein two solo crafts orbited the Earth at the same time.
On June 16, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova, age 26, became the first woman in space.
Valentina and Valery followed adjacent paths of orbit and came within five kilometers of each other's vessels allowing them to exchange communications. Valentina orbited the earth 48 times and logged 70.8 hours in space with her single flight - more flight time than the combined times of all American astronauts who had flown before that date. Scarcely known information that remained classified for over 40 years is that the mission was almost a tragedy. There was an error in the automatic navigation system which caused the capsule to move away from Earth. Thankfully, Valentina noticed, and ground control was able to configure a new landing algorithm.
Despite this, Valentina’s director was
unimpressed with her performance and claimed that she was ”on the edge of