THE WOMAN WHO OPENED A DOOR NO OTHER HAS FULLY ENTERED AGAIN

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VALENTINA TERESHKOVA

Valentina was born in the small village of Maslennikovo in 1937. Her father, a tractor driver, was killed in the Second World War when she was two years old. She left school at seventeen and went to work at a textile mill, continuing her education through correspondence courses while she worked. At eighteen she joined a local aviation club's parachuting section, an amateur hobby, not a career plan, and over the following years made well over a hundred jumps. It was a seamstress's hands and a factory floor, not a cockpit, that first shaped her.

Tereshkova wrote to the Soviet space program to volunteer, not knowing that officials were, at that moment, quietly assembling a group of women parachutists for exactly this purpose. She had no pilot training, but Vostok capsules required their occupants to eject and parachute down separately during reentry, and an accomplished amateur jumper with over a hundred descents was, by that measure, already qualified.

She was one of five women selected from more than four hundred applicants in 1962, and moved to Star City for training, centrifuge runs, isolation chambers, weightless flights, jet familiarization. The goal, from the Kremlin's side, was explicit, another space "first," claimed before the Americans could get near it.

Three days alone, further from Earth than anyone had gone, on 16 June 1963, at age twenty-six, Tereshkova launched aboard Vostok 6, two days behind Valeri Bykovsky's Vostok 5, the two craft flying a coordinated dual mission that at one point closed to within a few miles of each other.

Vostok 6 flew under automatic control; Tereshkova never took the stick. What she did do was endure, 48 orbits and 71 hours confined to a capsule barely large enough to move in, alone the entire time, logging more hours in space than every American astronaut before her combined. On 19 June she ejected at around 20,000 feet during reentry and parachuted the rest of the way down, exactly as her training had prepared her to.

She remains, to this day, the only woman to have flown a solo spaceflight, and at the time was the youngest woman ever to reach orbit. Twenty years passed before Savitskaya became the second woman in space, and another twenty before Sally Ride became the third.

She carried the Olympic flag at the Sochi opening ceremony in 2014, half a century after her flight, still, by then, the answer to a question nobody else had gotten to answer first. Whatever her later politics settled into, the fact underneath all of it has not moved, on 16 June 1963, a woman went to space alone, and it was her.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.