When was valentina tereshkova in space

Edit Profile. Subscribe Now. Your Subscription Plan Cancel Subscription. Home India News Entertainment. HT Insight. My Account. Sign in. Sign out. Has she honestly enjoyed this life lived so much in the public eye? Aware of the current chill in the international climate, Tereshkova sees herself, not for the first time with a responsibility to help improve things through public diplomacy.

In the UK, she might be surprised to discover how relatively few now know her name. The global impact of her flight, with the near-universal recognition that followed, has faded over the years, though not in Russia, and not for me, as a child of that era.

Unsmiling and austere, sometimes in military uniform, Tereshkova is a fixture in my memory as she remains for many Russians. She was always conspicuous, not least because women were so few in the top line-ups for official Soviet occasions. As a Moscow-based correspondent in the late s, I saw her at the various political gatherings convened by Mikhail Gorbachev in his twin causes of glasnost and perestroika.

She made the transfer, effortlessly, or so it seemed, into the elite of post-Soviet Russia. But it is the grainy footage of Tereshkova the cosmonaut that is most memorable. We knew about Laika, the dog who won the animal space race for the Soviet Union in , but who died sooner than we knew.

Four years later, Yuri Gagarin just pipped the American, Alan Shepard, to be the first man into space. A year later, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Then, in , the pendulum swung back, with Tereshkova registering a win for the Soviets, when she became the first woman to fly in space. Perhaps the most coveted prize, though, went to the Americans when they made the first moon landing in You can sense, even 40 years on, that this victory still rankles just a little with Russians to this day.

Tereshkova only gave her definitive account 30 years later, and she repeats it for my benefit. She denies being ill — or more ill than might be expected — or failing to complete the on-board tests; the voyage was, actually extended from one to three days at her request, and the tests had been planned only for one.

As for insubordination, there was a hitch, and a serious one, that emerged soon after lift-off. As she tells it, she discovered that the settings for re-entry were incorrect, to the point where she would have sped into outer space, rather than back to Earth. She was eventually sent new settings, but her space centre bosses made her swear to secrecy about the mistake, to save their own reputation and that of the programme.

While working at a textile mill at the age of 18, she took correspondence courses from an industrial school and joined a club for parachutists, making over jumps. Shortly after the flight of cosmonaut Gherman Titov in September of she wrote a letter to the space center volunteering for the cosmonaut team. Unknown to her, Soviet space officials were considering the selection of a group of women parachutists. In December Valentina was invited to Moscow for an interview and medical examination.

The women were subjected to the same centrifuge rides and zero-G flights as male cosmonauts. Under the direction of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, four women were selected to be trained for a special woman-in-space program.

Of the four women selected, only Valentina Tereshkova completed a space mission. Tereshkova was launched aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, and became the first woman to fly in space. During the Upon completion of her mission, Tereshkova was honored with the title Hero of the Soviet Union. She never flew again, but she did become a spokesperson for the Soviet Union. On November 3, , Tereshkova married astronaut Andrian Nikolayev.