‘Here Seagull, here Seagull. I see a blue line on the horizon: it’s the Earth. How beautiful! Everything is going splendidly,’ the cosmonaut said who, at the age of 26, wrote her name into history.

She traveled on the Vostok 6 program mission, with the nickname Chaika, Russian for seagull, and was selected among over 400 applicants and five finalists to pilot the spacecraft.

Three days later and after over 70 hours of flight, on June 19 Tereshkova left the flight capsule and completed her descent by parachute from 6,000 meters to set foot in Karaganda, Kazakhstan.

In that way, she had become a spaceflight legend.

She was the first to reach space, but the list of Russian women grew and she was followed by others such as Svetlana Savitskaya, the first woman to walk in space and the second to leave when she crewed the Soyuz T-7 in 1982.

In total, of the 566 astronauts who traveled into space, only 65 have been women.

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