Valentina Tereshkova

Russian cosmonaut

• Born: March 6, 1937
• Place of Birth: Bolshoye Maslennikovo, Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

In 1963, Tereshkova became the first woman in space. During her seventy-one-hour flight, she achieved an altitude of more than 143 miles and traveled a distance of l,222,020 miles. Upon her return to the Soviet Union, she became a national hero and traveled the world extolling the virtues of the Communist system. She later served as a Soviet politician.

Early Life

Valentina Tereshkova was born on a collective farm about two hundred miles from Moscow. Her father, a former tractor driver on a commune, was lost in the Finno-Russian War sometime during 1939 or 1940, when Tereshkova was just two years old. Her mother and older sisters worked in the Krasnui Perekop (Red Canal) textile factory during Tereshkova’s school years. At age seventeen, Tereshkova began working at the Yaroslavl tire factory while continuing her studies for Young Communist Workers. In 1955, she joined her mother and sisters as a spindler in the textile factory. At the same time, she completed studies during evening classes at the polytechnic institute in Yaroslavl. By 1961, Tereshkova had become a cotton-spinning technologist. She also headed the Textile Mill Workers’ Parachute Club, making her first jump at age twenty-two, and eventually had 126 jumps to her credit. She joined the Communist Party and became secretary of the local Komsomol (Young Communist League).

In world politics, the Cold War began to intensify. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin successfully orbited the earth. US astronaut Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight followed on May 5. Gherman Titov flew aboard Vostok 2 on August 6 and was the first to experience space sickness. On August 11 and 12, 1962, Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev arranged for two spacecraft to launch within twenty-four hours of each other for the world’s first group flight. Vostok 3 contained Andrian G. Nikolayev, whom Tereshkova would marry in 1963, while Vostok 4held Pavel R. Popovich. Though the two craft flew within four miles of each other, they could not maneuver without expending a great deal of fuel, so an actual rendezvous was not possible. Neither cosmonaut experienced space sickness during his three- to four-day journey, and Soviets began to feel better about the safety of longer flights. Space sickness apparently depended more on the individual than on the length of the flight.

Following Gagarin’s successful flight of Vostok 2, many women wrote to Moscow asking about spaceflight training. Air force majors Vera Sokolova and Marina Popovicha were rejected. Sokolova was a flight surgeon with many hours of flying experience; Popovicha was a qualified jet test pilot with an engineering degree, and she was married to cosmonaut Pavel Popovich. Khrushchev, however, decided that the woman selected to fly into space would not be an elite, highly trained specialist but rather an ordinary factory worker. He wanted to demonstrate that under socialism, any woman could fly into space.

Life’s Work

In November 1961, five selected trainees—Tatiana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponamareva, Irena Solovyeva, Zhanna Yorkina, and Valentina Tereshkova—secretly reported to training camp. All were under thirty years old, stood less than five feet seven inches in height, and weighed less than 155 pounds. They were also required to have parachuting experience because the Vostok spacecraft design required the pilot to bail out just before it made a hard-earth landing, as opposed to the soft-water landing US spacecraft made. Tereshkova was the only one without higher education. The five women trained as copilots and later progressed to piloting jets. The women received physical training, classroom lectures, and further jet-flight orientation. Following their preflight training courses in jet aerobatics in a two-seater MIG trainer, the women received commissions as second lieutenants in the Soviet Air Force.

Nikolayev, the pilot of Vostok 3, had become a flight cadet in 1951. He was the only bachelor among the cosmonauts. The women were all single. Nikolayev was assigned as their training coach. Some reports claim that Tereshkova was chosen from the other candidates because of her subsequent engagement to Nikolayev. Other journalists wondered how much of a part Khrushchev played in matching the pair.

Tereshkova’s flight,Vostok 6, was launched at 12:30 p.m. Moscow time on June 16, 1963, following Valeri Bykovsky’s Vostok 5 launch by forty-five hours and thirty minutes. She was the tenth person to enter space. Both spacecraft were launched from the Baikonur space center in the central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. Tereshkova’s radio call name was Chaika (seagull), while Bykovsky’s was Yastreb (hawk). Both frequently sent greetings to other nations while in orbit and appeared on Moscow television. Water from each cosmonaut’s home area had been chemically treated to kill bacteria and was installed in each spacecraft. When the cosmonauts were thirsty, they pushed a button and water entered a mouthpiece through a rubber tube. For washing, they used pieces of cheesecloth soaked with a soap-and-water mix. Both were on a schedule of four meals per day. Meat, caviar sandwiches, and fruit were cut into small pieces to make eating easier. Vitamins were added to the rations to help normalize metabolism in the weightless state.

Aviation Week and Space Technology reported in its July 1963 issue that perhaps the objective of Vostok 5 and 6 had been to make visual, optical, radio, and radar observations of their vehicles upon crossing courses. This exercise would give future cosmonauts an opportunity for inspection or even neutralization, if necessary, of a target vehicle. The Soviets agreed it was a wonderful space feat, but the flight mostly celebrated the fact that a woman had entered the space arena and that it had been the Soviet Union that had achieved it.

On the second day of Tereshkova’s flight, Bykovsky became alarmed when he failed to rouse his travel companion. Tereshkova finally responded that she had overslept, and she reported promptly thereafter. Once again, both spacecraft flew within three miles of each other, but a true rendezvous was still not possible. Tereshkova was permitted to take manual control of her spacecraft for one orbit.

Years after her mission, Tereshkova revealed that shortly after launch, she discovered a problem with her spacecraft's automatic orientation system which meant that initiating the landing sequence would take her farther from Earth, not closer to it. Ground control had to send and install a new program while Tereshkova was in orbit, which it fortunately was able to do with no further complications. After completing forty-eight orbits over the course of two days, twenty-two hours, and fifty minutes, Tereshkova landed during her forty-ninth orbit. She touched down at 11:20 a.m. in an area 386 miles northeast of Karaganda, a coal-mining and industrial city in Kazakhstan. Bykovsky completed eighty-one orbits and landed about 360 miles northwest of Karaganda.

Following their successful landings, Tereshkova and Bykovsky were warmly greeted by Premier Khrushchev at Moscow’s airport. In his welcoming speech, Khrushchev compared Tereshkova’s courage to that of Marina Raskova, the World War II hero buried in the Kremlin wall. Despite rumors of disorientation and space sickness, Tereshkova became an instant celebrity and began touring different countries, extolling the virtues of her country and its values.

In November, Tereshkova and Nikolayev married in a simple ceremony at the Griboyedov Street Palace. Gagarin, Bykovsky, and the two men's wives were witnesses for the couple. Acting as surrogate father for both bride and groom, Premier Khrushchev and his wife hosted a gala reception. Khrushchev reeled off a twenty-one-toast salute during the four-hour-long state splurge.

Following her honeymoon, Tereshkova continued her travels. She assumed dozens of ceremonial posts and moved into the office of chair of the Committee of Soviet Women in Moscow. She also received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and continued her studies at the air force academy. On June 10, 1964, Tereshkova gave birth to daughter Elena Andrianovna, the first child of two spacefarers. There had been some popular concern that the birth might be complicated and the health of the baby might be impaired since both parents had been in space. However, neither the child nor the parents seemed to suffer any ill effects from exposure to elements of space.

Tereshkova continued with her studies at the air force academy. A published account of the First USSR Conference on Space Physics in June 1965 announced that Tereshkova had determined the existence of a dust layer around Earth at about twelve miles from its surface that seemed to play a major role in the development of enigmatic nacreous clouds. The crew of the Voskhod 1 confirmed Tereshkova’s findings. In 1966, she received the rank of major in the Soviet Air Force. In September 1969, she earned a diploma from the Zhukovsky Aircraft Engineering Academy, which qualified her as a full-fledged engineer. By April of 1977, Tereshkova had earned her doctorate in aeronautical engineering.

After the overthrow of Khrushchev, speculation that the marriage of Tereshkova and Nikolayev may have been orchestrated by the Soviet premier was fueled when the couple stopped living together and no longer stood near each other in official photographs of the cosmonauts. In 1982, their marriage ended in divorce. Tereshkova later married again, to Yuliy Shaposhnikov, a physician, who died in 1999. Afterward she moved to a dacha near Star City, the cosmonaut enclave northeast of Moscow.

Even though the first group of women cosmonauts was disbanded in 1969, Tereshkova stayed on the payroll of the cosmonaut corps as an instructor at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center until April 1997, when, having reached the age limit, she was retired with the rank of major general by the decree of Russian president Vladimir Putin and became a senior staff scientist at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. In the meantime she was involved in a wide variety of political, social, and scientific activities, many of them unpaid. Her record as a model Communist earned her admission to the Supreme Soviet as a deputy from 1966 to 1989 and a member of the Presidium beginning in 1974. She also joined the World Peace Council in 1966, became vice president of the Women's International Democratic Federation in 1969, was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1971 to 1989, and was an official representative at the United Nations' World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975, held in honor of International Women’s Year.

In 1994 the Russian Federation made Tereshkova chair of the Russian Center for International Scientific and Cultural Cooperation, and beginning in 1998 she served on the editorial board of Polyot (flight), a Russian popular-science magazine. She was also known to support orphanages and help out fellow Russians. Her achievement as a cosmonaut and work for peace brought her international recognition and many honors. The Soviet Union awarded her two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, the Tsiolkovsky Gold Medal of the Academy of Sciences, a bronze bust in Moscow’s Space Heroes Alley, and honorary citizenships of six cities. Tereshkova also received honorary doctorates from three foreign universities, the Joliot-Curie Gold Medal, the Simba International Women’s Movement Award, a gold medal from the British Interplanetary Society, and the United Nations Gold Medal of Peace. A crater on the far side of the moon is named for her, as is an asteroid. In 2000 she was named Greatest Woman Achiever of the Century by the International Women of the Year Association. President Putin invited Tereshkova to his home to celebrate her seventieth birthday in 2007. At the celebration, she volunteered for any planned mission to Mars, even if that mission were to be one way.

Tereshkova was elected to the State Duma as a member of the United Russia Party in 2011. In June 2013, Tereshkova again visited Putin at his residence, this time to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of her historic spaceflight. During the celebration, Putin awarded her the Order of Alexander Nevsky in honor of her decades of public service. Tereshkova carried the Olympic flag at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Tereshkova was re-elected in 2016, then again in 2021. In 2022, Tereshkova voted in favor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, resulting in severe international criticism and sanctions.

Significance

Tereshkova’s feat as the first woman in space stands as a remarkable legacy on its own. However, aside from biomedical information, her record flight produced at least two other practical benefits. Her flight demonstrated that a healthy person can, with proper training, withstand the strains of launch, weightlessness, and reentry without having the highly specialized professional background of a military test pilot, and it also opened the way for the training of scientists for later, more complex missions. She also became one of the first space voyagers to enter politics and turn scientific notoriety into a stepping stone for sociopolitical causes, in her case peace and women’s issues.

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