Only two years after Yuri Gagarin's maiden flight, the Soviets demonstrated another propaganda victory when they launched the first woman into space
On April 12.4.1961, 24, the entire Soviet Union held its breath when Yuri Gagarin made history and became the first man in space. Among the millions of citizens who followed the historic flight in amazement and admiration, there was also a 6-year-old textile worker in a factory in a rather remote village in the Yaroslavl region. A little more than two years later, Hapoel herself entered the Vostok-XNUMX spacecraft, and wrote her name forever in the pages of history, as the first woman in space.
Valentina Tereshkova (Tereshkova, or in Russian Терешко́ва), was born in March 1937 in the village of Meselnikovo in central Russia, to hardworking parents who came there from Belarus. Her father was a tractor driver, and her mother is a seamstress in a textile factory. When she was two years old, her father was killed in a military conflict between the USSR and Finland, and her mother struggled to raise her three children in the shadow of the World War, when the Nazi forces came within a few tens of kilometers of the village. Only after the war, at the age of eight, Valentina started attending school, but her educational career did not last long. When she finished eight years of study, she had to leave school and go to work, to help support the family. She worked for a year in a tire factory, before joining her mother and sister who worked in the local textile factory. However, she did not give up her studies, and received a high school diploma after completing correspondence courses at the School of Industrial Studies. Tereshkova was also an ardent communist, active in the local branch of the communist youth movement and later - also in the party itself.
When she was 22 years old, Terashkova responded to her friend's pleas, and joined her in skydiving at a local club. One skydiving was enough for her to fall in love with the sport, and she spent every free moment at the skydiving club, to the dismay of her mother, who saw this hobby as a masculine pursuit, inappropriate for a young girl.
Wanted: Uneducated worker
Shortly after Gagarin's flight, when the Soviets were leading the space race by a huge margin, the USSR decided to score another small victory over the Americans, and send a woman into space. There were very few female pilots throughout the Soviet Union, so it was decided to open the selections to women with parachuting experience as well. Such an experience was essential for the first space pilots - for safety reasons, the Soviets preferred that the spacecraft and the cosmonauts reach the ground separately, and the pilots had to abandon the spacecraft and parachute from a height of about 6,000 m.
No fewer than 400 women offered their candidacy to become space pilots. A special committee headed by Gagarin himself sorted the applicants. The threshold requirements were age - less than 30, height - less than 1.70 m (similar to the male cosmonauts who had to squeeze into the tiny "Vostok" spacecraft), weight - less than 70 kg, preferably from the working class and without higher education. The leader of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, was determined to prove to the West that in the communist country anyone can fly a spaceship, even if they didn't go to university. To Tereshkova's credit were also her extensive experience in parachuting (126 parachutes), her activity in the party and the fact that her father was a war hero. This is how she found herself among the five women selected for the training course.
The Soviet space program operated in its early days under a heavy shroud of secrecy. The five teams received the rank of officer in the Soviet Air Force, and were taken to a top secret training facility. Tereshkova's mother was told only that she was training for an international skydiving championship. The training program for the five women was very similar to that of the male cosmonauts: training flights in zero gravity, survival in extreme conditions, centrifuge training, flying fighter jets, many parachutes and functioning in prolonged isolation conditions, alongside comprehensive theoretical studies to complete all the necessary knowledge.
Four of the five women successfully completed the grueling training program at the end of a whole year. The managers of the space program decided that they were interested in trying again to fly two spaceships at the same time, and decided that two of the women would fly them. Tereshkova was scheduled to take off first, and her companion, Valentina Ponomaryova, was scheduled to fly two days after her, so that the two spacecraft would pass side by side in space. However, a few weeks before the flight, the directors of the Soviet space program decided to reduce the number of women. The first flight (and the longest of the two) was given to cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky, and Treshkova got the second flight. The unlucky Ponomaryova was only assigned to the second backup squadron of the mission, and never got to fly into space.
Secrets and seagulls
On June 14.6.63, 5, Bikovsky was launched in the Vostok-48 spacecraft. Two days later it was Tereshkova's turn to stand on the launch pad. Her nickname in the contact system was Chaika - seagull in Russian. After reaching orbit around the earth, the seagull encountered quite a few difficulties. She suffered from nausea due to the lack of gravity, and for some of the time she felt a real blur, until ground control considered cutting her mission short. However, Tereshkova managed to overcome and complete all the tasks as planned, including taking photographs from the spacecraft window, and the planned passage very close to Bykovsky's spacecraft (only five kilometers separated them) - including a joint conversation with him and the leader Khrushchev on the communication system. She completed XNUMX laps of the earth in three days, but before her landing a disaster almost happened. Tereshkova noticed that the automatic flight system was moving the spacecraft away from Earth, instead of aiming for an atmospheric entry path. She warned about this, and the fault was fixed in time - something that saved her from a tragic death in space and the system planners from a tragic death by execution, or from an equally tragic life in a labor camp in Siberia. The incident was kept a secret for many years, and was finally published only four decades after the historic flight.
On June 19.6.63, 70, Tarshkova and the spacecraft descended as planned in the Kazakh steppes, after 50 hours and XNUMX minutes in space - she stayed in space longer than the cumulative flight duration of all six American astronauts who had gone into space up to that time. Tereshkova's mother learned about the flight only from a radio broadcast she listened to after landing, while reading a letter from her daughter - a letter in which Tereshkova told about the arduous training for the skydiving competition...
Parenting and politics
After her landing, Treshkova received great respect and tokens of appreciation. In the same week, she was awarded two of the highest decorations of her country - the Order of Lenin and the "Heroine of the Soviet Union" decoration. In November 1963, she married cosmonaut Andrian Nikolaev, who had flown into space a few months before her. The hasty marriage gave rise to rumors that the two were forced to marry as part of a Soviet scientific experiment that wanted to examine the effect of being in space on the descendants of cosmonauts. However, seven months later the marriage also gave birth to a baby girl, Yelena, who was indeed the first person born to two space pilots. The rumor mill also included reports of various deformities that the girl suffers from, but Yelena was a healthy child and is now a doctor.
Although she never flew into space again, Tereshkova continued to work in the Soviet space program. She completed her missing formal education by studying space engineering (which she graduated with honors), and in 1977 she received a doctorate in engineering. She also integrated very successfully into political life in Moscow - she was a member of the Supreme Soviet and held a long series of executive and representative positions. Today, at the age of 76, she allows herself to slow down the pace of work and devote herself a little to her grandchildren. Ahead of the anniversary of her flight, President Putin visited her at her home, and presented her with another badge of honor - the Nevsky decoration. The roof of the house, by the way, is decorated with a vane in the form of a seagull, a reminder of that historic flight.
The women were left behind
Although Strashkova did not define herself as a "feminist", her flight into space was a tremendous achievement for the status of women. Unfortunately, despite her many activities for women, the future of women in space flight was much less equal. None of her teammates on the first team of cosmonauts got to fly into space, and no less than 19 years passed before another woman got to fly into space (Svetlana Savitskaya, USSR). Only in 1983 did an American astronaut arrive in space (Sally Reed) and only then - with the beginning of the shuttle era - was the way opened for more women to fly into space. Of the approximately 540 people who have gone into space to date, 58 have been women. Four of them paid for it with their lives: Judith Resnik and Christa McAuliffe (who was supposed to be the first teacher in space, and technically did not make it to space itself) were killed in the Challenger disaster in 1986, Laurel Clark and Kalpana Chavela perished in the Columbia disaster.
