Which is the first woman in space in 1963?

The first woman to travel in space was Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova. On 16 June 1963, Tereshkova was launched on a solo mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6. She spent more than 70 hours orbiting the Earth, two years after Yuri Gagarin’s first human-crewed flight in space.

In 1963, Tereshkova became the first woman in space, just two years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

However, as the investment in the space programmes grew, so did the gender gap. It took another 19 years until Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya, aboard the Soyuz T-7 mission in 1982, became the second woman to travel into space. 

Savitskaya returned on a 1984 mission to become the first woman to fly to space twice, and the first woman to perform a spacewalk. 

While over 500 people have flown in space, to date, only 11% of them have been women. Nearly all of these women flew in the NASA program, and the rest were in the Soviet/Russian and Chinese space programmes. 

 

Picture Credit : Google