First Woman in Space Celebrates Historic 50 Years of Women in Orbit

It's official. We're hitting the 50 year mark when it comes to the history of women in space on Sunday. In 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was launched into space, making her the first woman to blast into orbit.

Tereshkova's flight came only two years after Yuri Gagarin performed the first spaceflight ever in 1961, according to Space.com. He was followed by Gherman Titov and then Valeriy Bykovsky. In an effort to maintain their lead over America in the space race, the Soviet space program decided to be the first to send a woman into space, according to Discovery News. That's when Tershkova took to the skies in the Vostok 6 capsule.

Space wasn't as comfortable as it is today. Tershkova spent three days in the cramped capsule, strapped to her ejection seat inside the pressurized cabin. Wearing a SK-2 space suit, she ran a series of biomedical experiments while learning to live and work without gravity. After her mission, she used manual controls to hold Vostok steady while firing the rocket engine to slow the capsule and begin her long fall through the atmosphere, according to Discovery News.

Only about ten percent of the people that have flown into space are women. In fact, it took 20 years after Tereshkova flew into space before an American woman, Sally Ride, made her own debut in space. Since then, more than 40 women have flown to orbit as NASA astronauts, according to Space.com.

"There have been so many boundaries broken," said Cathy Lewis, curator of the international space programs collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in an interview with Space.com. "We've had a woman commander, woman pilot. We've had an all-woman crew that just occurred out of coincidence because it just so happened that they were assembled for their skills. I think the United States is leading the way."

Today, we can look back at Tereshkova's historic flight and see how far we've come. Space programs have continued to integrate women into them, and more and more female astronauts and cosmonauts are making it into space.