Women in space

Women have flown and worked in outer space from the beginning of human spaceflight. Overall women have been significantly less often chosen to go to space than men, and in June 2020, constituted only 12% of all astronauts who had been to space. The proportion of women among space travelers has been increasing substantially over time. The first woman to fly in space was Soviet Valentina Tereshkova, aboard the Vostok 6 space capsule on June 16–19, 1963. Tereshkova was a textile-factory assembly worker, rather than a pilot like the male cosmonauts flying at the time. By October 2021, most of the 70 women who have been to space have been United States citizens, with missions on the Space Shuttle and on the International Space Station. Other countries (USSR, Canada, Japan, Russia, China, United Kingdom, France, South Korea, Italy, Belarus) have flown one, two or three women in human spaceflight programs. Additionally one woman of dual Iranian-US citizenship has participated as a tourist on a US spaceflight. During the Artemis II lunar flyby in 2026, Christina Koch became the only woman to leave low Earth orbit and to travel around the Moon. The Artemis IV lunar landing, scheduled for 2028, is planned to send the first woman to lunar orbit and the lunar surface. Women face many of the same physical and psychological difficulties of spaceflight as men. Scientific studies generally show no particular adverse effect from short space missions. It has even been suggested by some that women might be better suited for longer space missions. Studies have continually indicated that the main obstacle for women to go to space remains gender discrimination.

History

Early Space Race struggle In the competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States known as the Space Race, both nations chose their first space pilots (known as cosmonauts in the USSR and astronauts in the US) in the late 1950s and early 1960s from the ranks of their military high-speed jet test pilots, who were exclusively men.

In 1959, after their research project Woman in Space Earliest of the Air Force Air Research and Development Command was not permitted, Don Flickinger and William Randolph Lovelace II subsequently formed a group of thirteen women US pilots, dubbed by the American press as the "Mercury 13". The women took and passed the same health screening tests as the men, supervised by Lovelace Clinic staff. This was funded privately (e.g. by aviation pioneer Jacqueline Cochran) and not by the government; the idea of female astronauts faced a great deal of resistance in the military command and NASA, leaving these women no chance of becoming astronauts. Jerrie Cobb of the "Mercury 13" became a consultant to NASA in 1961 and testified before Congress in July 1962 about the "Mercury 13"'s positive medical results and gender discrimination. Meanwhile, the USSR's director of cosmonaut training, Nikolai Kamanin, lobbied for women as cosmonauts, after being inspired in 1961 by repeated questions from the foreign press about women in space. Kamanin crucially gained space program leader Sergey Korolev's support, getting approval six months later for women cosmonauts. During a visit to the US in 1962 Kamanin got to know Jerrie Cobb of the then rejected "Mercury 13". Kamanin noted 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." The Soviet government generally had no interest in women as cosmonaut pilots, but Premier Nikita Khrushchev was interested in the propaganda value of Soviet superiority over the US in women's equality. In February 1962 a group of five female cosmonauts from over 400 applicants were chosen to be trained for a solo spaceflight in a Vostok spacecraft. To increase the odds of sending a Soviet woman into space first, the women cosmonauts began their training before the men.

First Woman in Space

The first woman to fly in space was Valentina Tereshkova, a textile factory worker who was an avid amateur parachutist. Parachuting was necessary for the Earth landing which was made outside the reentry capsule. Tereshkova flew aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, completing a 70.8 hour flight making 48 orbits of Earth. Kamanin framed her as "Gagarin in a skirt". Tereshkova married Vostok 3 cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev on November 3, 1963, at the Moscow Wedding Palace, with Khrushchev presiding at the wedding party together with government and space program leaders. Kamanin said it was "probably useful for politics and science". Tereshkova gave birth to their daughter on 8 June 1964, the first person with both a mother and father who had traveled into space.

Further female missions cancelled Kamanin hoped to fly two other women on the Voskhod 3 and 4 flights, despite the opposition of Yuri Gagarin and the other male cosmonauts. These plans were canceled in 1965, leaving the women with Soviet Air Force officer commissions. The American Apollo program to land a man on the Moon included only male astronauts. Neither the USSR nor US launched another woman into space until women were admitted to the astronaut and cosmonaut corps in the late 1970s.

Later Space Race advances By 1971 NASA had hired staff to address adherence to legal requirements to include underrepresented people of society. Star Trek star Nichelle Nichols was hired to assist after she spoke at the National Space Institute for the inclusion of women and minorities as astronauts. On January 16, 1978, NASA announced Astronaut Group 8 including people of minorities, and six women: Mission specialists Anna L. Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judith A. Resnik, Sally K. Ride, Margaret Rhea Seddon, and Kathryn D. Sullivan.

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