Valentina Tereshkova
Born March 6, 1937, Valentina is a retired Soviet cosmonaut, and was the first woman in space. She was selected out of more than four hundred applicants, and then out of five finalists, to pilot Vostok 6 on the 16 June, 1963, becoming both the first woman and the first civilian to fly in space, as she was only honorarily inducted into the USSR’s Air Force as a condition on joining the Cosmonaut Corps. During her three-day mission, she performed various tests on herself to collect data on the female body’s reaction to spaceflight.
Before being recruited as a cosmonaut, Tereshkova was a textile-factory assembly worker and an amateur parachutist. After the dissolution of the first group of female cosmonauts in 1969, she became a prominent member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, holding various political offices. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she retired from politics, but remains revered as a hero in post-Soviet Russia.
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6 comments:
Valentina was an epic lady, but I am a bigger fan of Geraldine Cobb - first lady astronaut trainee for NASA. She never got to go into space but was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work, flying aide missions to South America.
Did a little piece on my blog about her a while back
http://wax-and-pins.blogspot.com/2010/08/geraldine-jerrie-cobb.html
Cool. Look forward to checking that out. Loves me my great astronaut women.
I'd float in space with her any day!
She would party like it ws 1917 all over again.
A real communist heroine. She had to attend her job in the factory while training to be a cosmonaut. Amazing, my kind of heroine too.
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