Who was the first woman to travel into space?

Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel into space.

The Soviet Union launched Tereshkova aboard Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. She was selected from a group of female parachutists and completed 48 orbits of Earth during a mission lasting almost three days. Her flight occurred two years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

Tereshkova’s mission overlapped with Vostok 5, flown by cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky. Although the two spacecraft did not physically dock, the flights demonstrated coordinated operations in orbit.

Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, while Svetlana Savitskaya later became the first woman to perform a spacewalk. Those achievements are important milestones, but they came after Tereshkova’s pioneering flight.