On June 16, 1963, a 26-year-old factory worker from a Russian village climbed into a small metal ball on top of a giant rocket. Her name was Valentina Tereshkova, and three years earlier she had been stitching cotton at a textile mill. Her hobby was parachute jumping. When the Soviet space program asked for female volunteers who could parachute safely, she sent in her application. Out of more than 400 women, she was the one they picked.
The rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and within minutes Valentina was orbiting Earth aboard a tiny spacecraft called Vostok 6. She circled the planet 48 times in about three days, traveling almost two million kilometers. Her radio call sign was Chayka, which means "seagull" in Russian. From her little window she could see the Sahara Desert, thunderstorms over the Indian Ocean, and her own hometown go by. When it was time to come home, she ejected from her capsule and parachuted to the ground in a field, just like she'd practiced. Soviet farmers came running, offered her bread and cheese, and asked what on earth she was doing in a spacesuit.
It would be 19 more years before another woman flew in space - Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. Valentina went on to become a politician, a hero of the Soviet Union, and a quiet legend. In 2013, at age 76, she said she would happily fly to Mars even if she could never come back. Today there is a crater on the Moon named Tereshkova, and somewhere in space, a seagull is still flying.
