Valentina Tereshkova: the first woman in space

Valentina Tereshkova was born in 1937 in a small Russian village, in a simple family that worked the land. Her father died when she was still a child, and her mother raised three children on what she could earn at a factory. There was not much room for big dreams, and yet Valentina had learned to look up.

As a teenager she began practising parachute jumping, at first almost for fun, then with a dedication that surprised everyone who knew her. She would leap from the plane and as she fell she looked at the earth below, that strip of fields and rivers that from up there seemed like something else entirely, quieter and wider. She made hundreds of jumps, and each time she landed she wanted to go back up.

When the Soviet Union sought candidates for the first female spaceflight, Valentina put her name forward. She was not an engineer, not a professional astronaut. She was a young textile worker with a passion for flying. And she was the one chosen, from more than four hundred candidates.

On 16 June 1963 she departed aboard Vostok 6 and spent nearly three days in orbit around the Earth, completing forty-eight circuits. She looked at the planet through the porthole of the spacecraft, the same planet she had always looked down at during her parachute jumps, and understood that the boundary between what is possible and what is not often depends simply on how far you are willing to go.

Valentina Tereshkova remained for decades the only woman to have piloted a solo space mission. Her story is told in the book Valentina Tereshkova from the Little Great Heroes series, written in simple language for children who are learning to read.