On 6 March 1937, in the tiny village of Bolshoye Maslennikovo, 250 km northeast of Moscow, a girl named Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was born to a tractor-driver father who would soon die in the Soviet–Finnish War and a mother who worked in a cotton mill.
No one in her family had finished high school. No one had ever left the region. Yet at 26, this former factory worker and amateur skydiver would become the first — and still the only — woman to fly a solo mission in space.
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From Cotton Mill to Cosmonaut Corps
Valentina left school at 16 to help support her family, working in a tyre factory and then at the Yaroslavl textile mill where her mother was employed. By night she studied engineering through correspondence courses. Her real passion, though, was parachuting — she joined the local aviation club in 1959 and made her first jump at age 22.
In 1962, the Soviet Union wanted to beat the United States by putting the first woman in space. They needed someone with parachuting experience (because the Vostok capsule ejected the pilot at 7 km altitude for a separate parachute landing). Out of 400 applicants, five women were chosen for secret training. Valentina — a 25-year-old factory worker with no pilot licence — was one of them.
She outscored professional air-force pilots in centrifuge tests, isolation chambers, and zero-gravity flights. Sergei Korolev, the chief designer, personally picked her for the solo flight.
Vostok 6: 16 June 1963
On 16 June 1963, two days after Valery Bykovsky launched in Vostok 5, Valentina Tereshkova lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome. Her call sign was “Chaika” — Russian for “Seagull”.
She orbited the Earth 48 times in 70 hours and 50 minutes — more orbits than all American astronauts combined up to that point. She manually oriented the spacecraft, took photographs of the horizon (used to refine atmospheric models), and kept a meticulous flight log despite severe space sickness that the Soviet authorities hid for decades.
When she ejected at 7 km and parachuted into Kazakhstan, local farmers thought an alien had landed. She traded her spacesuit for a dress and shared bread and kefir with them before the recovery team arrived.
After the Flight
- First woman and first civilian in space
- Youngest person in space until 2021 (26 years, 103 days)
- Only woman ever to fly solo in space (all subsequent female astronauts flew in crews)
- Promoted to Major-General in the Soviet Air Force (1995)
- Earned a doctorate in engineering (1977)
- Served in the Soviet parliament and later the Russian State Duma until 2021
She married fellow cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev in 1963 (the first wedding of two space travellers) and gave birth to their daughter Elena in 1964 — the first child born to parents who had both been in space.
Still Flying at 88
As of November 2025, Valentina Tereshkova is 88 years old and lives in Star City outside Moscow. She still attends every major launch at Baikonur, still wears her blue cosmonaut jumpsuit on ceremonial occasions, and still volunteers with youth aviation clubs.
In a 2023 interview on her 86th birthday she said:
“I was an ordinary girl from a village. The Party gave me wings. I flew for all the women of the world who were told the sky was not for them.”
Sixty-two years after Vostok 6, no woman has flown a solo mission again. Valentina Tereshkova remains the first — and the only.
