Women in space

Women have flown and worked in outer space since almost the beginning of human spaceflight. A number of women from a range of countries have worked in space, though overall women are still 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. Yet, the proportion of women among space travelers has been increasing substantially over time.

Women were not qualified as space pilots and workers co-equal to their male counterparts until 1982. 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.

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, chosen for propaganda value, her devotion to the Communist Party, and her years of experience in sport parachuting, which she used on landing after ejecting from her capsule.

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.

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". Wanting the chance to become astronauts the women took and passed the 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 having women as cosmonauts, after being inspired in 1961 by repeated questions from the foreign press about women in space. Subsequently, Kamanin crucially gained space program leader Sergey Korolev as a supporter, 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". At one point 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 using women as cosmonaut pilots, but Premier Nikita Khrushchev was extremely interested in the propaganda value of proving Soviet superiority over the US in women's equality. In February 1962 from over 400 applicants a group of five female cosmonauts 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.

The first woman to fly in space was Valentina Tereshkova, a textile factory worker who was an avid amateur parachutist, as 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 a total of 48 orbits before returning to Earth.