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IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME

3/5/2021

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​March is Woman’s History Month, a time dedicated to highlighting “the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society.”

Unfortunately, not everyone – man or be. History is fickle: sometimes the simplest events are immortalized while major events are forgotten. woman – with noteworthy accomplishments gets credit for their achievements, however awesome they may The limelight may shine on those whose contributions, if they can be called that, are much less significant.

RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME
Not all heroes are born destined for greatness. Sometimes they are just in the right place at the right time. The import thing is that these people prepared themselves for something. Then, they recognized an opportunity-responsibility-necessity when it came along, picked up the ball and ran with it… without knowing where it would lead them or intending to make their mark on history.
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​Consider the case of "V", a girl born in 1937 to a farm worker [a tractor driver] and his wife. "V"s father will killed in WWII in 1939. The girl’s mother, left with three children to raise, went to work at a cotton mill. This girl didn’t go to school until she was ten years old, but graduated at seventeen. In 1954 she went to work at the same textile mill as her mother, but continued her studies through correspondence courses.

Perhaps to add some excitement to her hard life, she took up sky diving in the spare time she had, and made her first jump at 22. While still working full time she trained as a competitive parachutist without letting her family know. That’s a notable achievement right there!

Was this girl destined for greatness? She was a hard worker and competitive, for sure, but that’s not always an adequate background to hit the ground running in the race for international fame. Nonetheless, Valentina Tereshkova was the first, and youngest [26], woman in the world to go to space. She still holds the record as the only woman to fly a space mission solo.                                                                             
Valentina Tereshkova
                                                                                                                                      Image Credit: www.kremlin.ru.
                                                                                                                      Image Source: stormfront.org/t1202584/

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​A KICK IN THE BUTT
In 1961 after the Russians sent Yuri Gagarin into space, the American media gave the Russian Director of Cosmonaut Training, Nikolai Kamanin, a kick in the butt by printing stories that the United States was training females to become astronauts.

Whether the reports were true or not isn’t mentioned in the research, but it prompted the Kamanin to write in his diary,
"We cannot allow that the first woman in space will be American. This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women."

Kamanin saw to it that the next group of trainees [who were to begin in 1963] included women. The only requirements for a female to apply were that she be a parachutist under 30 years of age, less than 5’7” in height and 154 in weight. Four hundred applicants were selected as candidates for consideration. Of those, only 58 passed the first cut. In 1962;Tereshkova and four others were selected to be trained as cosmonauts for the upcoming Vostok missions.

Taken into the Soviet Air Force at the rank of “private”, but without any military experience, the five women started their rigorous training 9 months earlier than the male cosmonauts. During that time, Tereshkova also attended the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, although she didn’t graduate until a few years after her flight.
​

As the flight grew nearer, two of the five dropped out, leaving Tereshkova as one of the three potential pilots. On May 21, 1963 Tereshkova was assigned to pilot Vostok 6 and promoted to lieutenant before her flight. She was promoted to captain in mid-flight.

UP, UP AND AWAY
Vostok 5 launched on June 14, 1963 with male pilot Valery Bykovsky in command for a five day mission. Two days later, June 16, “Tereshkova and her backup Solovyova were both dressed in spacesuits and taken to the  launch pad by bus. Following the tradition set by Gagarin, Tereshkova also urinated on the bus tire, becoming the first woman to do so.” en.wikipedia.org/Valentina_Tereshkova

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Image credit: Roskosmos                                                              Image Credit: RussianSpaceWeb
Image source: russianspaceweb.com/vostok6                          
 
Image Source: russianspaceweb.com/vostok6
The launch was perfect. The first female astronaut was on her way to stardom.
Voskos 5 and 6 spent three days in orbital planes about 30̥° apart and came within 3 miles of each other for one obit. They could talk but could not see each other’s ship.


Tereshkova was in flight for a few minutes short of three days and orbited the earth 48 times, logging more flight hours than the combined times of all American astronauts who had gone into space before that date.

Her flight log and the photos she took of the horizon were subsequently utilized to identify aerosol layers in the atmosphere.
​
She ejected at four miles above the earth and made good use of her previous parachuting experience to land, with a bit of difficulty but safely 385 miles north east of Karaganda, Kazakhstan, with only a bruised nose. Nothing indicated whether or not this was the scheduled location for touch down. A statue commemorating her feat was constructed at the landing site.
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                                                                                                                      Image source: tumblr.com/tereshkova

​IS THERE LIFE AFTER SPACE FLIGHT?
Tereshkova was immediately a hero. She and Bykovsky were awarded the “Hero of the Soviet Union” medal in Red Square in front of a massive crowd. They also received the “Order of Lenin” at the Kremlin. Of all the Soviet astronauts, she was the most popular and made 42 trips abroad between 1963 and 1970.

In November of 1963 Tereshkova married cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev. The party was attended by Kruschev and top government officials.

Image Credit: RIA Novosti Archive/Alexander Mokletsov
Image Source:
astrobitacora.com/valentina-tereshkova
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According to Wikipedia, “The marriage was encouraged by the Soviet space authorities as a ‘fairy-tale message to the country’. General Kamanin, head of the space program, described it as ‘probably useful for politics and science’”

A year later she gave birth to a daughter named Elena [spelled several ways] Andrianovna Nikolaeva-Tereshkova, the first person with both a mother and father who had travelled into space. In the U.S. a rumor circulated that they were forced to marry by the government for the purposes of scientific study. There was no information about the daughter except one reference indicating that Elena grew up to become a doctor. 

Treshkova wanted to pursue her career as a cosmonaut and engineer, but the government had other plans. She was too valuable to them in other roles. Not long after she graduated from the Air Force Engineering Academy, the women’s cosmonaut corps was disbanded, and she was appointed to a political position.

 In 1976, after being promoted to a colonel in the Air Force and earning her doctorate in aeronautical engineering, Tereshkova tried to qualify for another class of women astronauts, but she never had the chance to go to space again. The Russians did not send a second woman into space until  Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. [The first American woman, Sally Ride, went to space in 1983.]

Later, Tereshkova told her biographer that the marriage with Nikolayev ended in 1977, but they didn’t divorce until 1982. Later, she met and married Yuli Shaposhnikov, a surgeon, and they remained married until he passed away in 1999.

NO LONGER A HOUSEHOLD NAME

Tereshkova remained active in government for her whole career. She retired from the Air Force with the rank of Major General in 2007 at the mandatory age of 60, and in 2003 she was elected to the State Duma [Parliament].

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When invited by Prime Minister Putin to celebrate her 80th birthday in 2017, she indicated to him she was ready to command a mission to Mars, even if it meant a one way trip.

During her career Tereshkova has earned and been awarded so many medals and honors there are too many to name, and she is one of the few living people with crater on the moon named after her.


March 3, 2017 – You do the math.
Image Credit: www.kremlin.ru.
Image Source: 
it.qaz.wiki/wiki/Tereshkova

□
Sources:
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1202584/
https://it.qaz.wiki/wiki/Valentina_Tereshkova
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56855121
https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/valentina+tereshkova?sort=top
https://www.astrobitacora.com/valentina-tereshkova-la-primera-mujer-en-el-espacio/
https://dailytimewaster.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-first-woman-in-space-was-valentina.html
http://listverse.com/2018/09/08/10-incredible-women-forgotten-by-history/
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1202584/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/178525572703073504/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Tereshkova
https://www.biography.com/astronaut/valentina-tereshkova
https://thestickyfacts.com/valentina-tereshkova-facts/
https://www.designobserver.com/feature/mothers-of-invention/39580
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok6_flight.html
https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/valentina-tereshkova-6586.php
https://fineartamerica.com/art/valentina+tereshkova?msclkid=8368ca58367715b228c2aa6fe3643933&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=OD%20-%20FAA%20-%20NB%20-%20DSA&utm_term=%2Fart%2F&utm_content=Art%20Pages
https://02varvara.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/a-multimedia-presentation-the-cinderella-of-the-stars-major-general-valentina-tereshkova-the-first-female-cosmonaut-the-female-achiever-of-the-century/03f-valentina-tereshkova/
https://www.designobserver.com/feature/mothers-of-invention/39580

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    Author R. Ann Siracusa

    Novelist, retired architect and urban planner, world traveler, quilter, owl collector, devoted wife-mother-grandmother, great-grandmother, and, according to some, wild-assed liberal.

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