Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (born in 1937), is the first woman in history to have made a journey into space, and the only woman to have made this journey alone.
Selected by Nikita Khrushchev
Valentina Tereshkova was born on March 6, 1937, in Maslennikovo, Russia, to a farmer father and a mother worker in a textile industry. She started school at 8 years old but left it at 16, continuing studies by correspondence and being hired as a worker in a textile industry. From a young age, she was interested in skydiving and trained in it, making her first jump at the age of 22, in 1959.
In 1961, after Yuri Gagarin's successful flight, Sergei Korolev, the head of the Soviet space program, decided to send a woman into space. Among 400 candidates, he selects 5 women, including Valentina, with the following criteria in particular:to be a parachutist, to be under 30 years old, to be less than 1m70 and 70 kilos. Coming from a proletarian background and the daughter of a hero of the Second World War (her father died in the war), Valentina is a candidate of choice; she is therefore selected among the 5 remaining candidates by Nikita Khrushchev himself. She then undergoes intensive training including zero-gravity flights, insulation tests, parachute jumps, engineering courses and piloting.
The first woman in space
On June 16, 1963, Vostok 6 took off without a hitch and Valentina Tereshkova became, at age 26, the first woman in space. In 70 hours and 41 minutes, it performs 48 orbits around the Earth. Despite feeling nauseous and uncomfortable for most of the trip, she keeps a travel diary and takes pictures of the horizon that will later be used to identify layers of aerosols in the atmosphere. On June 19, on the way back, Valentina ejected as planned; finding herself above a lake, she nevertheless manages to fly over it by parachute and land on dry land.
Held in secret, it was not until 30 years later that she revealed a malfunction of her ship:during the braking phase, the ship was oriented for the ascent and not the descent, which gradually moved it away from Earth. . Reporting the error to the ground crew, they were able to receive a fix and resolve the issue.
After the flight
After her flight, Valentina Tereshkova marries cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev and resumes her studies. Very sought after in politics, in 1971 she became a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1977, she obtained an engineering degree. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, she has lost none of her prestige and is still considered a heroine in Russia.
To this day, she remains the youngest woman to have flown in space, and the only one to have flown solo.