From Valentina Tereshkova to Wang Yaping and Karen Nyberg, this week marks the fiftieth anniversary of women in space.
Tereshkova launched into space on June 16, 1963, almost 20 years to the day before the United States would send its first woman into orbit. This Soviet first occured just two years after they put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. Tereshkova was just 26 years old, a factory worker who was an avid skydiver with more than 90 jumps to her credit.
Her craft orbited the Earth 48 times over the course of three days. After launch, she quickly discovered that her spacecraft was improperly programmed - information that was not released until after the fall of the Soviet Union.
"A problem appeared on the first day of the flight. Due to a technical error, the spaceship was programmed not for a landing, but for taking the ship into a higher orbit," Tereshkova said. Upon her return to Earth, she became a national symbol of the technological and social stature of the Soviet system. To this day, Tereshkova is still the only woman to have ever made a solo trip beyond the Earth's atmosphere.
Svetlana Savitskaya became the second woman in space, when the Soviets sent her into orbit in 1982.
Sally Ride, a physicist, became the first American woman in space on June 18, 1983 when she climbed into orbit aboard the space shuttle Challenger for mission STS-9. Ride passed away last year.
Since 1983, only one other Russian woman, Yelena Kondakova, has reached space, first in 1994 then for a return trip three years later. An all-female mission was considered by the Soviets but abandoned. The United States, starting 20 years late, has more than made up for lost time by sending more than 40 women into orbit.
On June 11, Wang Yaping became just the second Chinese woman in space, after Liu Yang, who reached orbit in 2012.
"NASA took (Tereshkova's flight) to heart, everyone took it to heart, that in order to sustain a space program they were going to have to make it not a program of high performance test pilots and a few selected scientists. They were going to have to do it as a more practical, day-to-day career in space," Cathy Lewis, curator of the international space programs collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, said.
Of the 534 people that have so far flown into space, 57 have been women. The greatest number of women in space at the same time was four, accomplished in April 2010. There are currently two female astronauts in space, Yaping and American Karen Nyberg, who has been aboard the International Space Station since May 28.
