Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Valentina Tereshkova, 1st Woman In Space
On this day in 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Tereshkova returned to Earth after spending nearly three days as the first woman in space and made 48 orbits of the Earth. She had been interested in parachute jumping when she was young, and that expertise was one of the reasons she was picked for the cosmonaut program. She became the first person to be recruited without experience as a test pilot. From Today in Science History
