Nine months later, on June 16, 1963, the Soviet authorities announced their latest propaganda triumph: twenty-six-year-old cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, a former textile worker and amateur parachutist with a recent trade school qualification as a “cotton spinning technologist,” had become the first woman in space. In a three-day journey aboard her Vostok 6 capsule, Tereshkova had orbited the earth forty-eight times—her single spaceflight longer than the total of all those made by US astronauts to date.
