Valentina Tereshkova it was a Soviet cosmonaut who became known as the first woman to go into space. She manned the Vostok 6 in 1963, remaining in space for 71 hours and performing 48 laps on the Earth. She was chosen as a cosmonaut after a long and secret selection process carried out between 1962 and 1963.
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Origin
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova born on March 6, 1937, in Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a city located in Yaroslavl Oblast (a kind of province that existed in the Soviet Union). Marked in Soviet history as a heroine, Tereshkova had a originhumble, since her family was from peasants.
![Valentina Tereshkova had humble beginnings but was recorded as the first woman to go into space.[1]](/f/df9a3e1081495767259367514643f101.jpg)
Her father, Vladimir Tereshkov, worked as tractor driver and she died when her daughter was just two years old. Her death happened during the WarinWinter, conflict waged by the Soviet Union and Finland in the late 1930s, near the border between the two countries mentioned.
To her were added two brothers, and after the death of her father, her mother, ElenaTereshkova, she decided to move to Yaroslavl. There she started to work in a textile factory called Krasny Perekop. At age 10, Valentina began her formal education, and at age 18, she started working, first in a tire factory and then in a textile factory.
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Training as a cosmonaut
During her youth, Valentina Tereshkova saw the opportunity to become a cosmonaut and embraced it. This was because her country was passing through the space race, an offshoot of Cold War. This race was basically a dispute between Soviet Union and U.Sto find out who would make the biggest strides in space exploration.
Among the chapters of this dispute, there was the sending satellites, living beings (like dogs) and from humans to space. The sending of the first woman to space was one of those fields of dispute, and the result was Valentina Tereshkova's mission. The opportunity for her to be sent into space as a cosmonaut arose around 1962.
In this period, Tereshkova was a worker which was part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Besides, she was parachutistamateur and performed jumps with great frequency, her first jump being done when she was 22 years old. As of March 1962, Tereshkova had made over 120 jumps.
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In 1962, the program was announced for a cosmonaut to be sent into space (Cosmonaut is the Soviet astronaut correspondent). The program had thousands of entries and reduced the number of candidates for fivewomen. The cosmonaut selection and training process took months and was secret.
You family and friends by Valentina Tereshkova didn't know she was preparing to go to space. In addition to the secrecy of the program, Tereshkova underwent strict tests that sought to verify if she would have the physical and psychological conditions to withstand the difficulties of a space travel.
Valentina Tereshkova ended up being one of the five selected by the program. With her were: valentinePonomaryova, TatyanaKuznetsova, ZhannaYorkina and IrinaSolovova. At the end of this process, the two selected were Valentina Tereshkova and Valentina Ponomaryovna. They would man the Vostok 5 and Vostok 6, respectively.
However, a major change took place, and Ponomaryovna was removed from Vostok 6. So Tereshkova was reassigned to Vostok 6, and a cosmonaut was appointed to man Vostok 5. This is believed to have happened by the visions feminists of Ponomaryovna.
THE choice of Valentina Tereshkova like the first cosmonaut was made by Nikita himselfKhrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party and ruler of the Soviet Union. It is believed that some factors may have contributed to this choice, as Tereshkova:
She was engaged with the party;
She was of humble origins;
She was a worker;
She was the daughter of a war hero;
She had experience with skydiving.
There is even talk that she did not get better results than the other candidates and that these factors we listed above were crucial for her choice. In short, the Soviet government saw Valentina Tereshkova as the ideal soviet woman.
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first cosmonaut
![A replica of the Vostok 6 capsule, the spacecraft that took Valentina Tereshkova into space.[2]](/f/ed8de47ca19f80860213aaa0fd28994a.jpg)
As mentioned, Tereshkova was chosen to man Vostok 6, and the launch of that spacecraft was scheduled for the day June 16, 1963. it happened in Baikonur, city that is currently in the Kazakhstan, but that was Soviet territory at the time.
Tereshkova's mission spanned 71 hours, since she performed 48 laps around the Earth. Among the challenges she faced during the mission, there was a problem in the spacecraft program, which, instead of approaching Earth, was causing the spacecraft to move away. She had to take manual control so she could re-enter the atmosphere terrestrial.
At about six thousand meters of altitude, the cosmonautif ejected from the Vostok 6 capsule and descended the remainder of this parachute course. She faced strong winds during the descent and landed on a collective farm that was on the border of Kazakhstan with the Russia. Tereshkova had dinner with the locals and was later rescued.
Other problems she faced were nausea and headaches. Despite this, the mission was a success and made her the first female cosmonaut in history. He was turned into a heroinnational, receiving honors and decorations from the Soviet government.
Professional and personal life after the trip
The Soviet program to send cosmonauts into space ended in 1969, and until that year, Tereshkova had been directly involved in the area. However, the Soviet government only sent another woman into space in the 1980s. Tereshkova's mission made her a woman nationally recognized, and this opened doors for her in the Soviet government.
She also received international recognition and visited different nations. In the Soviet Union, she was part of the Communist Party Central Committee. With the fragmentation of the USSR, it tried to get involved in Russian politics, but it only managed to be electedin 2011, for a position in the Federal Duma, an institution that represents the lower house of the Russian Legislature.
In her personal life, Valentina Tereshkova married twice. The first marriage was in 1963, with Adriannokilayev, and ended in 1982. Nokilayev was also a cosmonaut, and together they had a daughter named Elena. Also in 1982, she married the surgeon YuliShaposhnikov, and remained married until 1999, when he passed away.
Image credits
[1] Sergey Goryachev and Shutterstock
[2] scifier and Shutterstock
By Daniel Neves
History teacher
