Valentina Tereshkova Trivia
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49 free Valentina Tereshkova trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
On 16 June 1963 a 26-year-old former textile-mill worker became the first woman in space, and to this day she remains the only woman ever to fly a solo space mission. This Valentina Tereshkova trivia quiz covers the whole story: the amateur skydiver picked from 400 candidates, the three days and 48 orbits aboard Vostok 6, the parachute landing in Kazakhstan, and the 'cosmic wedding' that followed. It also follows her long second act as a Soviet and Russian politician, the lunar crater and asteroid that carry her names, and the honours and controversies of her later years. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer is verified and cited to its reference page. If you enjoy this quiz, try our other space and history quizzes.
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Q 01As of 2025, Tereshkova is still the only woman ever to have done what in space?
Flown a mission alone
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.
Q 02Which spacecraft carried Tereshkova into orbit?
Vostok 6
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.'
Q 03Which American became her country's first woman in space, 20 years after Tereshkova's flight?
Sally Ride
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.
Q 04What did mission planners forget to pack for Tereshkova's days in orbit?
A toothbrush
A toothbrush: she had toothpaste and water for her 48 orbits, so she used her hand instead, as she revealed in 2015.
Q 05As of 2025, which record set on her 1963 flight does Tereshkova still hold?
Youngest woman to orbit Earth
Youngest woman to orbit Earth: she was 26 and, unlike the male cosmonauts, had never piloted an aircraft before she was chosen.
Q 06What was Tereshkova's job before she was selected as a cosmonaut?
Textile factory worker
Textile factory worker: she left school as a teenager to help support her widowed mother, and kept up her studies by correspondence course.
Q 07Which hobby contributed most to Tereshkova's selection as a cosmonaut?
Skydiving
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.
Q 08What was Tereshkova's call sign during her flight?
Chaika (Seagull)
Chaika (Seagull) outlasted the mission: when astronomers honoured her with an asteroid, they named it Chaika rather than Tereshkova.
Q 09In which Russian oblast was Tereshkova born?
Yaroslavl
Her village, Bolshoye Maslennikovo, sits on the Volga about 270 km northeast of Moscow; her parents had migrated from Belarus.
Q 10In which conflict did Tereshkova lose her father when she was two?
Finnish Winter War
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.
Q 11From which Soviet launch site did Tereshkova lift off in June 1963?
Baikonur
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.
Q 12Which US programme prompted Nikolai Kamanin to push for a Soviet woman in space?
Mercury 13
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.
Q 13What did Tereshkova blame for being sick in orbit, where doctors suspected space sickness?
The taste of the food
Q 21What did Tereshkova's photographs of the horizon from orbit later help scientists identify?
Aerosol layers in the atmosphere
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.
Q 22How did Tereshkova return to the ground at the end of her flight?
Ejected and parachuted
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.
Q 23In the last minutes of her flight, what did Tereshkova fear she was about to come down in?
A lake
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.
Q 14Why could Soviet planners recruit the first women cosmonauts without any flying experience?
The capsule flew itself
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.
Q 15What became of the four women trained alongside Tereshkova?
None ever flew
None ever flew: plans for an all-women crew came to nothing, and the group was disbanded with her flight still its only mission.
Q 16Which aircraft did Tereshkova and her fellow women recruits learn to fly?
MiG-15 jets
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.
Q 17What nickname did cosmonaut training chief Nikolai Kamanin give Tereshkova?
Gagarin in a skirt
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.
Q 18Which Soviet leader spoke to Tereshkova by radio while she was in orbit?
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev's call went out on state television, along with live pictures from a camera inside her cabin.
Q 19Which male cosmonaut was in orbit at the same time as Tereshkova?
Valery Bykovsky
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.
Q 20How close did Tereshkova's capsule come to her fellow cosmonaut's during her first orbit?
About 5 km
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.
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.
Q 24Which honour was announced for Tereshkova at her Moscow homecoming in June 1963?
Hero of the Soviet Union
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.
Q 25Tereshkova's scorched space capsule left Russia in 2015 to go on show at which city's Science Museum?
London
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.
Q 26Which leader welcomed Tereshkova to his capital in October 1963, days before a deadly storm struck?
Fidel Castro
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.
Q 27Which monarch, also pregnant at the time, did Tereshkova visit in February 1964?
Elizabeth II
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.
Q 28Which fellow cosmonaut did Tereshkova marry in November 1963?
Andriyan Nikolayev
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.
Q 29What distinction does Tereshkova's daughter Elena hold?
First person whose parents had both been to space
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.
Q 30From which institution did Tereshkova graduate in 1969?
Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy
Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy was where the first cosmonauts were sent to qualify as engineers, and she enrolled there after her flight.