Jun 17, 2020
The United States might have put a man on the moon first, but it was the Russians who first sent a woman to space. The Vintage Space star and author Amy Shira Teitel joins the geeks this week on a supporters-only livestream recording session and Q&A about Valentina Tereshkova, a woman 20 years ahead of her US counterparts.
From the early days of the space race, research supported the
idea of women serving as astronauts and cosmonauts. Women tend to
have smaller bodies in every measurable way, and since spaceflight
often has to account for every ounce considering the price of
rocket fuel, it just made sense to send lighter, smaller bodies
into orbit.
But in the 1950s and 1960s, sexism was still king in both the USA
and the USSR. So women waited.
The first woman in space, on June 16, 1963, was Valentina Vladimirovna
Tereshkova. She was 26 at the time and one of several women
recruited into an aggressive cosmonaut training program due to her
early enthusiasm and skill for parachute jumping. The effort was
backed by Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev, who ordered a small group
of women be selected and trained for a women-in-space program.
Let’s not mince words here: Tereshkova was a badass from the
word go. She joined a paramilitary flying club without telling her
mother, spending her weekends training and completing 90 jumps
before she caught the Kremlin’s eye. “I did night jumps, too, on to
land and water — the Volga River,” she told The Guardian. “I
learned to wait as long as possible before pulling the cord, just
to feel the air; 40 seconds, 50 seconds… it’s not really falling;
you experience enormous pleasure from the sensation of your whole
body. It’s marvellous.”
She joined the Communist Party in 1962, as would’ve been customary
for the time.
The Soviets, of course, sent Yuri Gargarin into space in 1961, but
the director of cosmonaut training, Nikolai Kamanin, heard shortly
thereafter that the Americans were preparing to
train female pilots to be astronauts. Not wanting to be
outshined, the Soviets started their program with five women,
including Tereshkova, and had their training start before their
male counterparts.
The rules stipulated that the women had to be a parachutist and
under the age of 30, standing less than 170 cm (5 ft 7 in) tall and
weigh no more than 70 kg (154 lbs).
Of the small class of specially trained women, only Tereshkova went
to space, selected to pilot Vostok 6, while cosmonaut Valeri
Bykovsky piloted the sister mission on Vostok 5. He launched on
June 14; she launched two days later. Over the course of 70 hours in space, they came
within 5km (3 miles) of each other while in orbit and exchanged
messages. Tereshkova orbited the Earth 48 times, with European and
Soviet TV beaming back images of her smiling from space.
At the time, both Tereshkova and Bykovsky were record holders: she
for being the first woman in space; he for spending more time in
space alone than anyone — a record he still holds at just five
days.
Hers was not a flawless flight, however. The full details of her
stressful journey became apparent when her flight log was released to the public in
2013, including that she failed in her original attempt at
manually orienting the spacecraft while in orbit. The vehicle kept
listing to one side, with warning lights indicating things were off
kilter along all three axes. When she activated manual control, she
heard an empty knocking noise. On the second day of her flight, she
tried again but was unsuccessful, meaning she couldn’t complete her
mission of photographing the Earth from above.
It was during her 45th orbit that she successfully completed a
breaking maneuver, holding it for 25 minutes.
Later, as she was returning into Earth’s atmosphere, she and her
vessel had no communication with
the ground and she wound up in the wrong place. The team on the
ground blame Tereshkova for the failure; she says the equipment
failed.
Once she was collected by her countrymen, she was named a Hero of
the Soviet Union. She never went to space again, but none of the
women she trained with ever made it that far.
In November 1963, Tereshkova married a fellow
cosmonaut, Andrian Nikolayev. There was much fanfare about
their marriage and the birth of their daughter, Elena, as she was
the first child born to parents that had both been to space. In
1980, Tereshkova and Nikolayev divorced. There’s speculation that
the marriage was basically propaganda, because, y’know, Soviet
Russia.
Tereshkova received the United Nations Gold Medal of Peace,
directed the Soviet
Women’s Committee in 1968; from 1974 until 1991 she was a
member of the Supreme Soviet Presidium. She was appointed deputy
chair of the parliament of Yaroslavl, her home area, and was
elected to the Duma in 2011. She has also been awarded the Order of
Lenin twice.
The United States didn’t launch a woman into space until 1983,
when Sally Ride went into
orbit on STS-7 aboard the Challenger. (Yes, that Challenger.) This
was almost a year after Russia sent its second woman, Svetlana
Savitskaya, into space. Savitskaya, by the way, was the first woman
to walk in space and the first woman to go to space twice (1982 and
1984).
Ride joined NASA’s astronaut corp in 1978. She was one of the first
six women to join NASA as an astronaut.
The U.S. has taken a few strides toward leading the space race for
women in recent years.
In 1992, Mae Jemison became
the first African American woman in space when she flew on the
Space Shuttle Endeavor.
In 2008, Peggy Whitson became
the first woman to command the International Space Station; eight
years later she became the first woman to command the ISS twice,
also earning the title of the oldest woman in space at the age of
57.
It wasn’t until last year, October 2019, that NASA celebrated its
first all-female space walk, when astronauts Christina Koch and
Jessica Meir, spent seven hours and 17 minutes replacing a
power controller outside the ISS. But it wasn’t something NASA went
out of its way to organize — instead, the agency said it was “bound
to happen eventually” given the increasing number of female
astronauts.
Granted, the first all-female space walk was supposed to happen
a few months earlier, in March, but there was only one medium-sized
space suit available on the ISS and the other woman on the ISS at
the time, Anne McClain, felt she’d be safer and more comfortable in
a smaller size instead of wearing a larger suit. Instead, astronaut
Nick Hague joined
Koch on the walk. That incident prompted lots of angry comments and
parodies, of course.
NASA might feel confident about the number of women in its
astronaut corps, but they still don’t fully account for women in
space. The lack of properly fitting space suits is just the most
recent head-scratcher from the agency, which at one point was
hesitant to put women in space because they weren’t sure how to
accommodate them going to the bathroom in space, let alone having their periods in
space, should things synch up that way, because the agency was
afraid the women might not be able to perform their jobs properly.
No joke: When Sally Ride was preparing for her mission, NASA asked
her if 100 tampons would be
enough for a seven-day trip to space. (There are now ways to
prevent a woman from having her period in space, simply by using
the Pill. And if you don’t know, 100 tampons would last most women
way more than one period.)
In the early days of the space programs, scientists knew women had
an advantage for leaving Earth’s orbit. “Scientists knew that
women, as smaller beings on average, require less food, water and
oxygen, which was an advantage when packing a traveler and supplies
into a small spacecraft,” wrote historian Margaret Weitekamp for
the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “Women
outperformed men on isolation tests and, on average, had better
cardiovascular health.”
But by 1962, NASA scrapped its First Lady Astronaut Trainee (FLAT)
program. Sexist jokes were made about astronauts being all for
women in space — as recreational partners.
The Soviets, it seems, were ahead of their time by seeing their
female cosmonaut trainees as people capable of doing great things,
not just sex objects.
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