The story of “Valya,” the first woman in space
In this excerpt from The Women of the Moon: Tales of Science, Love, Sorrow, and Courage, authors Daniel Altschuler and Fernando Ballesteros share the story of Valentina “Valya” Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
“Hey, sky! Take off your hat, I’m coming!”
— Valentina Tereshkova, just before taking off in Vostok 6 (1963)
Valentina Tereshkova was raised in the small rural town of Maslennikovo in what was then the Soviet Union. Her father had died on the Finnish front during the Second World War and her mother raised three children under severe economic hardship. In 1959, after graduating from college, “Valya” joined the Yaroslavl Sports Air Club to learn skydiving, and she made her 1st jump at the age of twenty-two and would become an expert parachutist. Her hobby would become the key to her future.
Two years before her first parachute jump, the Soviet Union had put Sputnik into orbit, kicking off the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Space had become a new battlefield between the two opposing political-economic ideologies of these nations: capitalism and communism. After Uri Gagarin became the first man in space, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a challenge to the world: “And now let the capitalist countries try to catch up with our great nation, which has opened the way to outer space.”
The night of Gagarin’s flight, when Valentina returned home from the cotton factory where she worked, her mother made an off-the-cuff comment that would change her life forever: “Now that a man has gone into space, the next time a woman must go.” Valentina saw her course with crystal clarity: she would volunteer for the Soviet space program.
The timing was perfect. The Soviet Union had just launched an initiative to recruit a female team of cosmonauts. Supervised by Gagarin himself, the selection process began in 1961. Four hundred candidates applied and five were selected, Valentina among them.
Finally, the cosmonaut woman who would fly on the next mission had to be selected. It would be a double flight, in which the twin ships Vostok 5 and Vostok 6 would be launched at the same time, to meet (really just a flyby) in space. Initially, the plan was to send two women, but then Lead Engineer Sergei Korolev pondered that it would be more interesting to make a comparative study of the effects of space flight on the bodies of men and women. A man was to fly in Vostok 5 and a woman in Vostok 6. The male cosmonaut was Valeri Bikovski. Valentina was selected as the female.
Valentina was not the brightest of the group, nor in the best physical condition; but she had a story that made her perfect as an instrument of publicity for the regime. A proletarian of humble origin, she had worked her way through the Soviet regime and was also a member of the Communist Youth. Like Gagarin, she was a perfect example of the success a proletarian could achieve under a communist regime.
On the eve of the launch, when Tereshkova left home, she told her mother that she was going to a skydiving competition so that she would not worry. On Sunday June 6, 1963, when Bikovski had been in orbit for almost a day, Valentina took off in the Vostok 6. Her call sign during the mission was ‘chaika’ (seagull). Once in orbit, Valentina sent the message that would enter the history books: “Ya Chaika, Ya Chaika [I am Seagull]! I see the horizon [. . .] This is the Earth; how beautiful it is. Everything goes well.”
The feat was broadcast and televised throughout the Soviet Union, including in the Tereshkova household, where Valentina’s mother discovered where her daughter really was! In its first orbit, Vostok 6 approached nearly five kilometres from Vostok 5, and they established radio contact. Tereshkova said that she could even see Bikovski. The ships then separated as their orbits evolved and the cosmonauts engaged in biomedical experiments, and learned to work in the absence of gravity.
Vostok ships were so small that the cosmonaut could only fit inside half-lying down, tied to the ejection seat. Despite this, after twenty-four hours in orbit, Valentina passed word to mission control that she felt well and asked permission to extend the mission for up to three days. This was granted, and she spent the seventy hours and fifty minutes that her mission lasted in that cramped position, completing a total of forty-eight orbits around our planet. Finally, the re-entry and landing sequence began. The computer sent the order to turn on the rockets to slow the capsule and begin its descent towards the Earth, while Valentina used manual controls to maintain the entrance angle of the Vostok. After a hard re-entry, and once the ship had braked to a reasonable speed, Tereshkova ejected from the ship and descended to the ground by parachute.
Upon her return, Tereshkova was cheered in Red Square and received the highest honours for her historic flight. The politicians and engineers of the United States’ space program watched on in envy. The six Mercury missions that had flown so far (two of them suborbital) had accumulated fifty-three hours of flight together, less than what Tereshkova — a woman! — had done in a single flight of 48 orbits.
The Soviet space program would score yet another point in 1963 with the first spacewalk by cosmonaut Alekséi Leónov, but it soon suffered a major setback: Sergei Korolev, the driving force behind the Soviet space programme, died in 1966. With his death, NASA was finally able to gain an advantage that would culminate in the success of the Apollo mission and the landing of the Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility.
As for the female cosmonauts, Korolev’s dream was to have a female crew, but, as Tereshkova drily put it, after his death “another person came with other points of view.” Valentina never flew again, nor did any of the other cosmonauts in her group, which disbanded in 1969. It would take nearly twenty years for another woman to go into space.
After her space adventure, Tereshkova worked as a pilot and as a researcher, specializing in the study of stratospheric aerosols and publishing more than fifty scientific articles. At the same time, she got involved in international work to promote women’s rights. She was a member of the Committee of Soviet Women, and she became its director in 1977. In 1987, she was named director of the International Union of Culture and Friendship; and in 1999, she became head of the Russian Association of International Cooperation. In 2011, she was elected to the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Federation, where she continues to work.
Daniel Altschuler Stern is a professor in the Physics Department of the University of Puerto Rico, and Fernando Ballesteros Roselló is Head of Instrumentation at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Valencia. They are co-authors of Women of the Moon: Tales of Science, Love, Sorrow, and Courage.
