Happy Valentina’s Day! 🚀 👩🚀 💫
Today is the 57th anniversary of the first woman in space — Russia’s Valentina Tereshkova on Vostok 6, a scary bullet of a capsule that could not make a soft landing, necessitating a skydive leap during reentry (just as Yuri Gagarin had to do).
She was 26 at the time and an amateur skydiver. She is the youngest female astronaut and the only woman to fly solo. To date, only 12% of astronauts have been women, despite being arguably better suited for the job. That should change.
After the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961, Nikolai Kamanin, director of cosmonaut training, read in American media that female pilots were training to be astronauts. In his diary, he wrote, “We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American. This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women.” Approval was granted for five female cosmonauts in the next group, which would begin training in 1963. To increase the odds of sending a Soviet woman into space first, the female cosmonauts began their training before the males.
With a single flight, she logged more flight time than the combined times of all American astronauts who had flown before that date.
Her call sign in this flight was Chaika (Russian: Ча́йка, or ‘Seagull’), later commemorated as the name of an asteroid, 1671 Chaika. After her launch, she radioed down:
“It is I, Seagull! Everything is fine. I see the horizon; it’s a sky blue with a dark strip. How beautiful the Earth is”
— Wikipedia
As planned in all Vostok missions, Tereshkova ejected from the capsule during its descent at about four miles above Kazakhstan and made a parachute landing, quite a thrill ride for this skydiver!
She had dinner with some local villagers in the Altai Krai who helped her to get out of her spacesuit.
Her flight became Cold War propaganda to demonstrate the superiority of communism. At the 1963 World Congress of Women, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev used Tereshkova’s voyage to declare the USSR had achieved equality for women.
I bought this in France from Tereshkova’s instructor at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy. His translated description: “This is an angle measuring device of the Russian aerospace for astronomic navigation, especially for calculation of flight angles. It was personally used by the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. It is the model CMK 3 numbered 2416305 (badge on the device). The device still possesses the original leather strap. It consists of a turning wheel that is marked with degree values. Once the zero point on the scale is adjusted to a certain height, the orbs’ and targets’ location can be measured. In 1963, Tereshkova was the first woman to fly into space and remained the only woman in space until Svetlana Savitskaya’s flight in 1982. The device is in good condition with traces of use. The dimensions are 12 x 19.5 x 6 cm (height x width x depth).”
Part of the space collection at work. More angles below.
I found something fascinating in a post-reentry Soviet capsule: they print English rescue instructions on the exterior, presumably in case it lands in some random location, perhaps even in a foreign nation.
…but it is in a different handwriting, and only for the English! The Cyrillic looks like the same as my photo, begging the question as to how this happened. Maybe they were not as liberated as they claimed on the Soviet side.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was happy with the propaganda potential of her selection, since she was the daughter of a collective farm worker who died in the Winter War, and confirmed her selection as the first female cosmonaut.
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