TERESHKOVA, VALENTINA (born 6 March 1937), Soviet cosmonaut and the first woman and civilian in space. On June 16, 1963, two years after Yuri Gagarin's historic mission, Tereshkova orbited the Earth for two days inside a Vostok 6 spacecraft.
Born in Bol’shoye Maslennikovo, a small town a few hours from Moscow, Tereshkova initially pursued a career in textiles while secretly participating in a local skydiving and parachuting society; she has described parachuting as her first love. When she applied to the Soviet space program, Tereshkova had no pilot training yet she distinguished herself from roughly four hundred fellow candidates through her experience jumping out of planes; Vostok missions involved the cosmonaut's ejecting themselves and parachute-landing separately from the spacecraft. After eighteen months of training Tereshkova was inducted into the Soviet Air Force and selected for Vostok 6. The Vostok 6 flight was a joint mission with Vostok 5, which had been launched two days prior with a male Soviet cosmonaut, Valery Bykovsky. She spent almost three days in orbit, circling the Earth forty-eight times.
Following her mission, Tereshkova received the Hero of the Soviet Union award as well as the Order of Lenin. Though she wanted to continue spaceflights, Tereshkova was instead appointed leader of the Committee for Soviet Women and became a prominent global ambassador, traveling the world as a representative of the Soviet Union and the Communist party. In 1997 she retired from the Russian Air Force with the rank of major general; in 2011, after several unsuccessful campaigns, she was elected to the Duma, Russia’s legislative assembly, where she continues to serve today. Tereshkova’s successful journey into space marked a significant milestone for women in the field of space exploration; however, since Tereshkova’s achievement only five Russian women have traveled to space, with the most recent in 2015. Her political legacy remains complicated, however, and her support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has meant that in 2022 both the US and the European Union sanction her and froze her assets.