On the morning of June 16, 1963, a 26-year-old textile worker from the Yaroslavl region of Russia climbed into a capsule called Vostok 6 and, within hours, became the first woman to leave Earth.Valentina Tereshkova was not a military pilot.
She had no engineering degree.
What she had was nerve, a parachute licence, and the attention of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who had decided that the stars, too, should reflect the promise of the Soviet state.Her origins were ordinary by any measure.
Born on March 6, 1937, the second of three children, Tereshkova grew up in a household shaped by labour, her father drove tractors, her mother worked the looms of a textile plant.
She started school at eight, left at sixteen, and kept her education going through correspondence courses while her hands stayed busy on the factory floor.
