The first
female cosmonaut, the 10th person in the world to be sent into space.
Valentina Tereshkova flew into space alone aboard Vostok-6 on June 16, 1963. The
duration of the flight amounted to 2 days, 22 hours and 50 minutes, during
which the spacecraft orbited the Earth 48 times.
Valentina
Tereshkova was born in 1937 in the village of Bolshoye Maslennikovo in Yaroslavl Oblast, USSR. In 1960, she
graduated from Yaroslavl Light Industry Training School as a cotton spinning
technician, and in 1969 received a qualification from Zhukovsky Air Force
Engineering Academy as a pilot, cosmonaut and engineer. She enjoyed parachuting,
which later turned out to be one of the criteria for cosmonaut selection. Following
the spaceflight, she worked as a cosmonaut instructor until reaching mandatory
retirement age in 1997. Later she continued working as a politician,
which she had already been doing since 1966. Her daughter Elena is said to be the first
child in the world whose parents are both cosmonauts.
