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For South Africa's National Women’s Day / Week / Month we celebrate Valentina Tereshkova, the 26 year old skydiver who, whilst sitting atop a modified intercontinental ballistic missile about to launch to space said
“Hey sky, take off your hat. I’m on my way!”
Recruited partly because she’d already made 126 skydives, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space on the 16th June 1963.
In her one and only space flight, she accumulated more space-time than all American astronauts combined at the time; is still to this day the youngest woman to have flown in space; the only woman to have ever flown a solo space mission; and the only woman to have gone to space and landed back on Earth under her own parachute….
After manually controlling her miniature, 1960s spacecraft around planet Earth 48 times (once every 88 minutes), and manually navigating her re-entry back into the Earth’s atmosphere, Tereshkova ejected at around 20,000 ft from her tiny, very-hot, metal-descending-at-an-alarming-rate capsule... and skydived back to Earth!
Having flown 1.97 million kilometres, and after 2 days, 22 hours and 50 minutes in space, Valentina landed under her own parachute near today's Kazakhstan-Mongolia-China border. She then exchanged her ration packs and enjoyed dinner with local villagers who had helped her out of her spacesuit.
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