Valentina Tereshkova
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Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (Russian: ; born March 6, 1937), is a retired Soviet cosmonaut and was the first woman to fly in space, aboard Vostok 6 in 1963.
She was born in Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a small village in the Yaroslavl Oblast. After school she worked in a tire factory, and then studied engineering. She also trained in parachuting at the local Aeroclub, making her first jump at age 22 on 21 May 1959. In 1961 she became secretary of the local Komsomol (Young Communist League) and later joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Career in Soviet space program
After the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961, Sergey Korolyov, the head Soviet rocket engineer, came up with the idea of putting a woman in space. On 16 February 1962 Valentina Tereshkova was selected to join the female cosmonaut corps. Out of more than four hundred applicants, five were selected: Tatiana Kuznetsova, Irina Solovyova, Zhanna Yerkina, Valentina Ponomareva, and Tereshkova. Qualifications included that they be parachutists under 30 years of age, under 170 cm tall and under 70 kg in weight.
Tereshkova was considered a particularly worthy candidate, thanks in part to her "proletarian" background, and also because her father had died as a war hero fighting the Nazis. Training included weightless flights, parachute jumps, isolation tests, centrifuge tests, rocket theory, spacecraft engineering, 120 parachute jumps and pilot training in MiG-15UTI jet fighters. However, they were not truly integrated into the cosmonaut detachment and considered for flight assignments on an equal basis with the male cosmonauts. The Soviet leadership considered flights of women into space only to be for propaganda purposes. It was Nikita Khrushchev himself who made the final selection, choosing Tereshkova to become the first of the five to fly.
On June 16, 1963 she flew on Vostok 6, and became the first woman and first civilian to fly into space. Her call sign in this flight was Chayka (English: Seagull; Russian: ). She orbited the earth 48 times and spent almost three days in space, which was more than the combined flights times of all American astronauts at the time.
It was later reported that Korolev was unhappy with Tereshkova's performance in orbit and she was not permitted to take some manual control of the spacecraft as had been planned. His deputy Vasily Mishin claimed she was "on the edge of psychological instability". Tereshkova maintained a flight log and took photographs of the horizon, which were later used to identify aerosol layers within the atmosphere. She handed out her space-rations to on-lookers at the landing site, it is claimed in order to cover up the fact she did not eat enough during the flight.
Vostok 6 was the final Vostok flight and was launched only two days after Vostok 5 which carried Valery Bykovsky into orbit for five days, landing only three hours after Tereshkova in Vostok 6. The two vessels were at one point only 5km apart and established a radio link.
Even though there were plans for further female flights it took 19 years until the second woman, Svetlana Savitskaya flew into space, with the pressure of impending American Space Shuttle flights with female astronauts. None of the other four in Tereshkova's cosmonaut group ever flew.
Later career
After her flight she studied at the Zhukovski Air Force Academy, and graduated with a distinction as cosmonaut engineer in 1969. The same year, the female cosmonaut group was dissolved. In 1977 she received a doctorate of engineering. Due to her prominence she was chosen for several political positions: From 1966 to 1974 she was a member of the Supreme Soviet, from 1974 to 1989 in the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, from 1969 to 1991 she was in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In 1997 she was retired from the air force and the cosmonaut corps by presidential order.
After the Vostok 6 flight a joke began circulating that she should marry Andrian Nikolayev (1929–2004), the only bachelor cosmonaut to have flown. Although the couple did not dislike each other, there was no substance to the rumour, which eventually reached Khrushchev. He liked the idea and began applying pressure through Nikolai Kamanin, the commander of the cosmonaut detachment, for the couple to marry. They married on November 3 1963 at the Moscow Wedding Palace. Khrushchev himself presided at the wedding party, together with top government and space program leaders.
She gave birth to their daughter Elena Andrianovna (who is now a doctor and was the first person to have both a mother and father who had travelled into space) in 1964. She and Nikolayev divorced in 1982, though their marriage collapsed long before. Her second husband, Yuri Shaposhnikov died in 1999.
Valentina Tereshkova later became a prominent member of the Soviet government and a well known representative abroad. She was made a member of the World Peace Council in 1966, a member of the Yaroslavl Supreme Soviet in 1967, a member of the council of the Union of the Supreme Soviet in 1966-1970 and 1970-1974, and was elected to the presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1974. She was also the Soviet representative to the UN Conference for the International Women’s Year in Mexico City in 1975. She attained the rank of deputy to the Supreme Soviet, membership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee, Vice President of the International Woman’s Democratic Federation and President of the Soviet-Algerian Friendship Society.
She was decorated Hero of the Soviet Union, the USSR's highest award. She was also awarded the Order of Lenin, Order of the October Revolution, numerous medals, and foreign orders including the United Nations Gold Medal of Peace and the Simba International Women’s Movement Award. She was also bestowed a title of the Hero of Socialist Labor of Czechoslovakia, Hero of Labor of Vietnam, and Hero of Mongolia. A crater on the far side of the Moon is named after Tereshkova.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tereshkova lost her political office but none of her prestige. To this day, she is still revered as a Russian heroine, and to some her importance in Russian space history is only surpassed by Yuri Gagarin and Alexei Leonov. Since her retirement from politics, she appears infrequently at space-related events, and appears to be content with being out of the limelight.
External links
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