#WomenWeLove: Valentina Tereshkova, The First Woman To Ever Fly To Space

You know what’s amazing? In spite of the fact that the society is structured to subdue them and make it almost impossible for them to excel, tons of women all over the world have since the beginning of time, shattered (and continue to shatter) the barriers to rise.

In commemoration of the International Day of Human Space Flight today, we’re celebrating one of such women – Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to ever fly in space.

In 1963, 2 years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly in space, 26-year-old Valentina was selected from over 400 other applicants to repeat the feat.

Valentina piloted the space capsule, Vostok 6 into space where she spent three days and orbited the earth 48 times.

An error in the spacecraft’s automatic navigation software caused the ship to move away from Earth, according to the RT news channel. Tereshkova noticed this and Soviet scientists quickly developed a new landing algorithm. Tereshkova landed safely but received a bruise on her face.

She landed in the Altay region near today’s Kazakhstan-Mongolia-China border. Villagers helped Tereshkova out of her spacesuit and asked her to join them for dinner. She accepted, and was later reprimanded for violating the rules and not undergoing medical tests first.

Valentina married fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev, and together they made a daughter named Elena who became the first child in the world whose parents were both cosmonauts.

Her marriage to Andrian ended in 1982.

And although she hasn’t flown to space again since her historic first flight, Valentina has lived (and still live) a remarkable life holding various political offices in her home country of Russia.