Launched June 16 aboard Vostok 6, Tereshkova orbited Earth 48 times before her capsule descended by parachute over Kazakhstan on June 19, 1963. A former textile factory worker and amateur parachutist, she remains the only woman to have flown a solo space mission, a Soviet propaganda triumph that no Western nation would match for two decades.
Valentina Tereshkova was working in a Yaroslavl textile mill and skydiving on weekends when Soviet space officials, searching for a woman to fly for propaganda purposes, recruited her from a pool of amateur parachutists rather than trained pilots. Nikita Khrushchev wanted a dramatic first, and a working-class woman fit the ideological narrative perfectly.
Her flight aboard Vostok 6 launched June 16, 1963, and by the time she landed on June 19—ejecting from the capsule and parachuting down separately, standard Vostok procedure—she had orbited Earth 48 times, spending more time in space than all American astronauts combined up to that point.
She reportedly struggled with nausea and disorientation during the flight, details the Soviets suppressed for decades, and some accounts suggest a programming error nearly sent her capsule away from Earth rather than toward it, corrected just in time by ground control. It would be twenty years before Sally Ride became the second woman in space, and Tereshkova remains, to this day, the only woman ever to fly solo beyond Earth's atmosphere.