49 Fun Facts About Valentina Tereshkova

As of 2025, Tereshkova is still the only woman ever to have done what in space?

Flown a mission alone: hers was the last flight of the Soviet one-seat capsule, and every woman who has gone into orbit since has flown as part of a crew.

Which spacecraft carried Tereshkova into orbit?

Vostok 6 was the last flight of its programme, and she greeted the launch by calling out, 'Hey sky, take off your hat! I'm coming to see you.'

Which American became her country's first woman in space, 20 years after Tereshkova's flight?

Sally Ride flew on the shuttle Challenger in June 1983, twenty years almost to the day after Tereshkova, and by then a second Soviet woman had already been up.

What did mission planners forget to pack for Tereshkova's days in orbit?

A toothbrush: she had toothpaste and water for her 48 orbits, so she used her hand instead, as she revealed in 2015.

As of 2025, which record set on her 1963 flight does Tereshkova still hold?

Youngest woman to orbit Earth: she was 26 and, unlike the male cosmonauts, had never piloted an aircraft before she was chosen.

What was Tereshkova's job before she was selected as a cosmonaut?

Textile factory worker: she left school as a teenager to help support her widowed mother, and kept up her studies by correspondence course.

Which hobby contributed most to Tereshkova's selection as a cosmonaut?

Skydiving: she had joined her local flying club without telling her mother and made her first jump at 22, less than three years before she was picked.

What was Tereshkova's call sign during her flight?

Chaika (Seagull) outlasted the mission: when astronomers honoured her with an asteroid, they named it Chaika rather than Tereshkova.

In which Russian oblast was Tereshkova born?

Her village, Bolshoye Maslennikovo, sits on the Volga about 270 km northeast of Moscow; her parents had migrated from Belarus.

In which conflict did Tereshkova lose her father when she was two?

Finnish Winter War: her father, a tractor driver, never came home from the fighting of 1939–40, leaving her mother to bring up three children by herself.

From which Soviet launch site did Tereshkova lift off in June 1963?

Baikonur, on the Kazakh steppe: two days earlier she had stood there and watched another cosmonaut's rocket go up, knowing that hers was next.

Which US programme prompted Nikolai Kamanin to push for a Soviet woman in space?

Mercury 13 was a privately funded project that put women pilots through the astronauts' medical tests; Kamanin wrote in his diary that an American first would insult Soviet women.

What did Tereshkova blame for being sick in orbit, where doctors suspected space sickness?

The taste of the food, she said, not her own condition; she spent decades denying engineers' claims that she had been too ill to carry out her tasks.

Why could Soviet planners recruit the first women cosmonauts without any flying experience?

The capsule flew itself: automatic systems and ground control ran the flight, and on the very first crewed mission the pilot's manual controls had even been locked.

What became of the four women trained alongside Tereshkova?

None ever flew: plans for an all-women crew came to nothing, and the group was disbanded with her flight still its only mission.

Which aircraft did Tereshkova and her fellow women recruits learn to fly?

MiG-15 jets, in the two-seat trainer version: recruits who had arrived with no military experience finished the course as commissioned Air Force officers.

What nickname did cosmonaut training chief Nikolai Kamanin give Tereshkova?

Gagarin in a skirt: Kamanin saw in her the same mix of humble roots, charm and party loyalty that had made the first cosmonaut a worldwide celebrity.

Which Soviet leader spoke to Tereshkova by radio while she was in orbit?

Nikita Khrushchev's call went out on state television, along with live pictures from a camera inside her cabin.

Which male cosmonaut was in orbit at the same time as Tereshkova?

Valery Bykovsky had launched two days ahead of her and was meant to stay up for eight days, but he was brought home after five, landing three hours behind her.

How close did Tereshkova's capsule come to her fellow cosmonaut's during her first orbit?

About 5 km was the closest the two capsules came during the flight; after that their paths drew them apart, but the two pilots had made contact by radio.

What did Tereshkova's photographs of the horizon from orbit later help scientists identify?

Aerosol layers in the atmosphere showed up in her pictures, a bonus from a flight flown mainly to measure how a woman's body coped with space.

How did Tereshkova return to the ground at the end of her flight?

Ejected and parachuted: the capsule hit the ground too hard for anyone inside, so every pilot of that design left it about four miles up and came down separately.

In the last minutes of her flight, what did Tereshkova fear she was about to come down in?

A lake lay right below her and she had no way to steer, but a strong wind carried her clear of the water and set her down hard on dry land.

Which honour was announced for Tereshkova at her Moscow homecoming in June 1963?

Hero of the Soviet Union was the country's highest award; it lifted her into the Soviet elite and onto a lifelong treadmill of official duties she had never sought.

Tereshkova's scorched space capsule left Russia in 2015 to go on show at which city's Science Museum?

London borrowed it for an exhibition called Cosmonauts, and Tereshkova, then 78, came to open the show beside the capsule that had carried her into orbit.

Which leader welcomed Tereshkova to his capital in October 1963, days before a deadly storm struck?

Fidel Castro met her at Havana airport on 1 October 1963; Hurricane Flora hit Cuba while she was still touring the island and killed more than a thousand people.

Which monarch, also pregnant at the time, did Tereshkova visit in February 1964?

Elizabeth II had Prince Edward a month later, and Tereshkova, the cosmonaut most in demand abroad, was touring Britain while expecting the daughter she had that June.

Which fellow cosmonaut did Tereshkova marry in November 1963?

Andriyan Nikolayev was the only bachelor among the cosmonauts who had flown, and the Soviet leader himself presided at a wedding the space authorities had encouraged.

What distinction does Tereshkova's daughter Elena hold?

First person whose parents had both been to space: doctors took a close interest in the baby for that reason, and Elena grew up to become a doctor herself.

From which institution did Tereshkova graduate in 1969?

Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy was where the first cosmonauts were sent to qualify as engineers, and she enrolled there after her flight.

Which cosmonaut became the second woman in space, 19 years after Tereshkova?

Svetlana Savitskaya flew to the Salyut 7 space station in 1982, recruited as American women trained for the shuttle, and reached orbit ten months before the first of them.

Which body was Tereshkova appointed to lead in 1968, against her wishes?

Committee for Soviet Women: after the first cosmonaut's death that year, the programme would not risk another celebrity in the air, and she fought the appointment in vain.

In 1969 a gunman fired on a car carrying Tereshkova, believing which Soviet leader was inside?

Leonid Brezhnev was not in the car at all: it was carrying four cosmonauts to a Kremlin ceremony, and the shots killed their driver.

What rank did Tereshkova hold when she retired from the Air Force in 1997?

Major general, a rank she had held since 1995: she left on reaching the compulsory retirement age of 60, thirty-five years after joining with no military experience.

To which body was Tereshkova elected in December 2011?

The State Duma had eluded her twice, in 1995 and 2003, before she won a seat at 74, some 45 years after she first entered the Soviet parliament.

Which planet did Tereshkova say she would fly to even on a one-way trip?

She said it at her 70th-birthday celebration at Putin's residence in 2007; the 2015 short film Valentina's Dream is based on that wish.

What did Tereshkova propose during the 2020 Russian constitutional amendments?

Lifting presidential term limits was one of two options she put to parliament; Vladimir Putin backed the other, resetting his own count to zero so that he could run again in 2024.

Where on the Moon is Tereshkova crater?

The far side was first photographed by the Soviet probe Luna 3 in 1959, which is why her crater sits on the edge of a lunar sea the Soviets named after Moscow.

Tereshkova's launch-pad cry of 'Hey sky, take off your hat' borrowed a line from which Russian poet?

Vladimir Mayakovsky had to rename the poem the line comes from: the censor struck out his first title, The Thirteenth Apostle, so it appeared as A Cloud in Trousers.

Which band's 2015 album The Race for Space includes a track called 'Valentina'?

Public Service Broadcasting built the album from archive recordings of the Space Race, but for 'Valentina' they brought in the duo Smoke Fairies to co-write and sing.

At which Games did Tereshkova help carry the Olympic flag into the stadium?

2014 Winter Olympics: aged 76, she was one of eight Russians who bore the flag into the stadium at Sochi, where the torch that lit the cauldron had flown to the space station and back.

Which fault did Tereshkova report from orbit and then keep secret for decades?

A wrong re-entry setting, by her own account, would have sent her capsule climbing away from Earth instead of down; ground control sent a correction, and she kept the story to herself for decades.

What was one of the all-women Soviet crew meant to do on the flight cancelled in the mid-1960s?

Walk in space: one cosmonaut was to fly the ship while the other went outside, but the flight was dropped, and no woman made a spacewalk until 1984.

How did Tereshkova's flight plan change once she was in orbit?

Extended to three days: her tasks had been planned for a single day, and the extra two gave her more hours in space than every American astronaut before her put together.

What minor injury did Tereshkova pick up in her hard landing at the end of the flight?

A bruised nose: a high wind drove her into a heavy landing and her face struck her helmet, leaving a dark bruise.

Where did Tereshkova represent the USSR at the 1975 UN International Women's Year conference?

Mexico City hosted the first conference the UN had ever devoted to women, and the meeting led to the declaration of a UN Decade for Women.

What was the profession of Yuli Shaposhnikov, Tereshkova's second husband?

Surgeon: Yuli Shaposhnikov, an orthopaedic specialist and medical-service general, met her through her cosmonaut check-ups, and they stayed together until he died in 1999.

Which party did Tereshkova stand for in 2011?

United Russia, the ruling party, took the former Soviet Central Committee member into her home region's parliament in 2008 and into national office in 2011.

Why was naming a lunar crater after Tereshkova in 1970 unusual?

She was alive: lunar craters normally honour the dead, but in 1970 astronomers made a special exception for a group of astronauts and cosmonauts who were still living.