The first woman ever to fly in space was Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who launched into low-Earth orbit in 1963 aboard the Vostok-6 capsule. Tereshkova reconfirmed how awesomely tough she was five decades later, when—at that point a 76-year-old—she said that she’d drop everything to fly to Mars, and never come back.
“Most likely the first flight will be one way,” Tereshkova said to journalists in Star City, Russia, where the cosmonauts train, on the fiftieth anniversary of her flight.
“But I am ready.”
Many remarkable women have traveled into space: Sally Ride, who was the first female NASA astronaut, and physician Mae Jemison, the first black woman to leave Earth. Then there's the European Space Agency's Samantha Cristoforetti, who spent 200 consecutive days living in space, the longest stretch for any woman. Roberta Bondar, Chiaki Mukai, Anousheh Ansari—the list goes on.
t no woman has travelled beyond low Earth orbit: Of the 12 astronauts who’ve visited the Moon, all have been men. No woman has lived in space for an entire year, a milestone recently achieved by Scott Kelly, who became the first NASA astronaut to do it. Since Yuri Gagarin was shot into space, in 1961, a total of 543 humans have left Earth, according to a 2016 report from Gregor Reid and Camilla Urbaniak at Western University in London, Ontario.
Just 11 percent have been women.
There’s an important consequence to this. Life in space is full of risks—astronauts have to deal with radiation, possible vision and bone loss, and a huge range of other challenges—and men and women are affected differently. Because we fly fewer women, scientists know less about how they respond to life in zero gravity.
"There have been very few female long-duration astronauts," said Cristoforetti, who spoke with Motherboard following the premiere of A Beautiful Planet, a new IMAX film showing Earth from space. "And so we haven't had any research, really, into the differences [between how men and women experience space travel]," she continued, "because the numbers are so small." Anything that has been observed could just be an individual variation, and not hold true across a larger group.
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