First astronaut, engineer, and politician.
She is a Russian engineer, the first woman to travel to outer space, on June 16, 1963, aboard the Vostok 6.
Valentina Vladimírovna Tereshkova was born on the 6th March 1937, in the small village of Maslennikovo in Yaroslav to a very humble family. Her father, Vladimir Aksyenovich Tereshkov, was a tractor driver and her mother, Elena Fedorovna, worked on the farm. The little girl's childhood was hard. She lost her father in the Russo-Finnish War when she was only three years old, leaving her alone with her sister and mother (who was 27 and pregnant with her brother Vladimir). Faced with this bleak landscape, all three were forced to move to the city of Yaroslav in 1945 and go to work in a fabric factory. Valentina did not set foot in school until the end of the war, aged 8. For a year, she was employed in a tire factory and subsequently returned to the textile industry while combining work with industrial technical engineering studies.
As a child she dreamt of flying, and in 1959 she enrolled in a skydiving aeroclub that was linked to the Soviet Air Force. Once at the club, she soon established herself as one of the most advanced paratroopers. With the jumps she had discovered her greatest hobby and, unknowingly, the key that would open the doors of space.
In 1961, the USSR decided to put the first woman into orbit before the United States did. Yuri Gagarin's feat had been a major propaganda boost for the Soviet Union, and they were unwilling to allow the Americans to take revenge. To this end, Lieutenant General Nikolai Petrovich Kamanin began the search for women cosmonauts. It was clear that the selection was to take place in the military field and, since there were no female pilots in the Soviet Air Force, she turned to DOSAAF (Volunteer Society for Collaboration with the Army, Aviation and Fleet). Candidates, mainly from skydiving and aviation clubs, had to meet the following prerequisites: be between 18 and 30 years old, measure less than 1.70 m in height, weigh less than 70 kg, be single and be "ideologically pure". No pilot experience was required as the Vostok ships were fully automatic, but they did need to be good paratroopers since the ship did not have any devices to land and the astronauts would be "fired" from the ship by parachute. DOSAAF made a first list of 400 participants who, after various controls under Kamarin's supervision, were eventually reduced to five.
Candidates were officially announced on April 3rd, 1962, after which they entered the Air Force with the rank of soldier. Yuri Gagarin welcomed them to the Cosmonaut Training Center where they underwent hard physical tests and received training in mathematics, meteorology, astronomy, physics, computing, and space navigation. The working day began at nine in the morning with theory classes and continued with the physical preparation and talks from specialists from academic institutes. The effort required of those selected was titanic and earned them the respect of their male companions, who at first gave them an unfriendly welcome. Finally, on May 21st, 1963, came the official communiqué, Tereshkova had been selected.
The main objectives of the mission were the analysis of the comparative effects of spaceflight on the women's and men's body; biomedical research; the development and improvement of the ship's systems under joint flight conditions and the development of radiocommunication experiments. The night before the launch, Valentina slept in the same bed Gagarin had slept in. “The next day I would see fulfilled the dream of flying that I had when I was little”.
Her journey lasted 70 hours and 50 minutes and she made 48 orbits around the Earth, exceeding by 50% the time of any American astronauts who had circled the planet. The USSR had got off to a great start in the space race with the USA and Valentina was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded the ‘Order of Lenin’.
Sources:
https://mujeresconciencia.com/2015/03/06/valentina-tereshkova-primera-cosmonauta/
https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2015-04-14/mujeres-astronautas-espacio_758597/
https://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2013/06/16/ciencia/1371383079.html
https://elpais.com/especiales/2018/mujeres-de-la-ciencia/valentina-vladimirovna-tereshkova.html