Valentina Tereshkova

Valentina Tereshkova is born in a village in Yaroslavl Oblast; her father is killed in the Winter War, when she is two. She works in a textile mill and joins an amateur parachuting club.

Chosen for her more than 100 parachute jumps and impeccable proletarian background as much as her flying, Tereshkova enters the secret women's group and trains alongside Ponomaryova and Solovyova.

Kamanin backs the idea of a woman in space for its propaganda value but treats the female group paternalistically; his diaries record the calculations behind Tereshkova's selection over Ponomaryova.

Valentina Tereshkova orbits 48 times in 2 days 22 hours 50 minutes aboard Vostok 6, a propaganda triumph that the USSR will not repeat with a woman for nineteen years.

Vostok 5 and 6 fly at the same time; Vostok 6 is launched into a nearly identical orbit, so the two craft come close without any active rendezvous. The dual flight showcases both endurance and the first woman.

In a state-managed wedding, Tereshkova marries fellow cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev; their daughter Yelena is studied with interest as the first child of two people who had both flown in space.

Ponomaryova serves as second back-up for the Vostok 6 flight, behind Irina Solovyova; a proposed second all-female or solo women's flight is cancelled. The chance never comes again.

Without flying any of them again, the cosmonaut corps quietly dissolves the female group. Tereshkova turns to politics and public life as a Soviet heroine and women's-movement figurehead.

Tereshkova remains a public figure into the 21st century, a deputy in the Russian parliament and, into her eighties, the surviving first woman of space.