Portal:Space exploration/Biography/Week 4 2007

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Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (Russian: Валенти́на Влади́мировна Терешко́ва; born March 6, 1937), is a retired Soviet cosmonaut and was the first woman to fly in space, aboard Vostok 6 on the 16th of June 1963.

After the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961, Sergey Korolyov, the head Soviet rocket engineer, came up with the idea of putting a woman in space. On 16 February 1962 Valentina Tereshkova was selected to join the female cosmonaut corps. Out of more than four hundred applicants, five were selected: Tatiana Kuznetsova, Irina Solovyova, Zhanna Yerkina, Valentina Ponomareva, and Tereshkova. Qualifications included that they be parachutists under 30 years of age, under 170 cm tall and under 70 kg in weight.