NASA has celebrated the launch anniversaries of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and Guion “Guy” Bluford, the first African-American in space, without many Americans asking why the Soviet Union beat NASA to those diversity milestones years ahead of time.
The United States launched Ride and Bluford into orbit in 1983, while the Soviets launched the first woman in 1963 — sending Valentina Tereshkova into space just two years after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.
The Soviets in 1980 also set records for representation by launching two non-white cosmonauts, Pham Tuan from Vietnam, and the first cosmonaut of African and Latino ethnicity, Cuban fighter pilot Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez.
NASA instead spent the 1960s and much of the 1970s turning away women and non-white astronaut candidates, even those who had completed astronaut training. It’s embarrassing when a spacefaring nation gets beaten at space diversity by the repressive, misogynist Soviet Union. Admitting that regret, however, can stoke progress.
The aerospace sector badly needs more skilled workers and a wider range of ideas. Remembering NASA’s rejections of aspiring non-white and women astronauts and recognizing those Soviet cosmonauts who achieved firsts for their gender or ethnicity would boost that effort for broader diversity.
NASA in 2023 took steps toward greater representation, including by posting many articles commemorating pioneering astronauts, engineers, and scientists of different genders and ethnicities. The Mission Equity plan also aims to change NASA policies, procurements, and grants in a way that can “help remove inequitable barriers and challenges facing underserved communities.”
Lack of diversity is so palpable in aerospace, however, that when NASA’s first Black administrator Charles Bolden received an aerospace award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Sept. 12, he challenged the audience to look around the other guests in the auditorium and said: “this is not what I consider a diverse gathering — work on that.”
Income inequality acts as a barrier to aerospace careers and even complicates the ability of Americans to afford commercial flights, Bolden told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global Aerospace Summit in Washington, D.C. The former NASA administrator also recalled the barriers he faced growing up in South Carolina during the era of “Jim Crow” racial segregation.
Even in the late 1970s after the end of segregation, Bolden says he was skeptical about the chances of himself and other Black men becoming astronauts. NASA had traditionally recruited military aviators to be astronauts, but Bolden says in the ’70s he doubted NASA would pick him despite his time as a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War.
NASA selected Bolden as an astronaut candidate in 1980, and he made the first of his four space flights in 1986.
Showing humility when accepting the award, Bolden said he wasn’t sure he deserved it or had accomplished enough, despite his career as a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot and a NASA astronaut even before he led the agency.
“What I had hoped to accomplish was for there to be more kids like me in aerospace,” Bolden said, lamenting the ongoing lack of diversity in aerospace.
Speaking with me after receiving the award, Bolden said women and non-white people have always worked at NASA, but he also told me “The 1960s was the time for them to become astronauts,” especially after Soviet cosmonaut Tereshkova became the first woman in space.
The stories of both American and Russian women who sought to launch into orbit are inspiring even as that history disrupts the tidy and sometimes counterproductive narrative of U.S. exceptionalism.
American women repeatedly pitched NASA and Congress to become astronauts after the founding of the agency in 1958. The most notable group of these American women was the “Mercury 13,” who had completed the same training as their male counterparts. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in April 1961 became the first human ever to reach Earth orbit, so both American men and women were eager to prove themselves in spaceflight.
Despite their determination, NASA officials brushed off the idea of women astronauts. The seven male astronauts in the Mercury program were no help either. When Congress in 1962 formed a subcommittee to discuss whether women should launch into space, Mercury astronaut and future Democratic senator John Glenn told the lawmakers: “The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.”
During a press conference after Tereshkova’s flight, a reporter asked Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper “is there any room for a woman astronaut in our space program?”
Cooper infamously responded, “we could have put a woman up instead of a chimpanzee,” which was particularly insulting because his aviator wife Ava was lobbying to become an astronaut.
Even President Lyndon Johnson, despite being a driving force behind both U.S. civil rights policy and the Apollo moon missions, privately torpedoed lobbying efforts by the “Mercury 13” women astronaut candidates.
Aerospace figures including test pilot Chuck Yeager, the first person to break the Mach 1 sound barrier, also dismissed the idea of African Americans going into space.
This public campaign by American women, however, ironically inspired the Soviet Union to send Tereshkova into orbit in 1963, with Moscow hoping to send women first and score influence in the space race.
NASA did not feel a similar pressure to launch women after the cosmonaut’s historic flight. The Cold War was a decades-long competition that sought constant one-upmanship in nearly every arena including hockey and chess, so this decision by NASA is of the rare examples when the U.S. did not try to compete against its Soviet rival.
The pioneering spaceflight of Tereshkova in 1963 occurred at the height of Cold War tensions. Despite this, her American counterparts in the “Mercury 13” group of aspiring astronauts have said that they admired and respected her as an example for the rest of the world of what women could accomplish.
When I visit a museum, watch a documentary, or read a book about space travel I often see references to Sally Ride. Yuri Gagarin has been commemorated more often in the U.S. since the post-Cold War thaw of the 1990s — but I almost never see a mention of Valentina Tereshkova. I believe in credit where credit is due, especially in human spaceflight.
Not that Tereshkova herself is wanting for attention. At 87 years old, she remains a national hero in Russia after having spent decades as a Soviet poster woman — even if she isn’t always popular.
Having launched into space at only 26 years-old in 1963, Tereshkova is one of the last living heroes from the dawn of the space age.
Born in 1937, Tereshkova’s childhood in Russia was haunted by World War II as the Nazis launched the largest invasion force in history to destroy and steal their way across the Soviet Union. Tereshkova’s father was killed in a different invasion, when the Soviets invaded Finland at the very start of the war in 1939. Raised by her widowed and stoic mother, Tereshkova grew up patriotic and became a leader of her local Communist Youth League in Yaroslavl.
Going to work in a textile factory, she was inspired by parachutists who did jumps near her city. Joining her local Aeroclub, she trained in skydiving and made her first jump in May 1959. When the Soviet space program decided to recruit a class of women cosmonauts, Tereshkova had already trained as a competitive parachutist and completed more than 50 jumps before 1963. Tereshkova has said in the decades that followed she has tallied more than a hundred jumps.
Both cosmonauts Gagarin and Tereshkova passed intense training and testing for spaceflight, but a factor in their selection was their loyalty to the Soviet Union. Each of their humble origins also made them favorites of Nikita Kruschev. The Ukrainian-born Soviet leader came from a family of peasants and wanted the pioneering cosmonauts to represent promises of achievement and equality that a Communist society could bring. Some cosmonaut trainees who did not fit the Communist Party line or who had upper class backgrounds were therefore passed over for missions.
Given the callsign “Seagull,” Tereshkova in 1963 rocketed into orbit in 1963 from Baikonur spaceport in present-day Kazakhstan, surrounded by the vast steppe where Moscow still rents its launch facilities.
Tereshkova in her first and only spaceflight spent three days and nights alone in a tiny capsule and orbited the Earth 48 times. During that one mission, she traveled farther than all previous American Mercury program astronauts combined, leaving NASA eating her dust. She still holds the record for the most time in space logged by a woman on a solo mission. No American or Russian has launched into space alone since 1963.
The Vostok spacecraft was not even designed to land Tereshkova upon re-entry, unlike like NASA’s Mercury capsules, and both capsules lacked the guidance and thruster support used by present-day spacecraft to reduce the speed of re-entry from orbit. That meant after spending three days alone in space, Tereshkova had to endure around nine times Earth’s gravity upon re-entry before ejecting the capsule at 20,000 feet to parachute back to the ground. Tereshkova has said she was given a pistol in case she landed in a remote forest and had to scare away an angry bear while awaiting recovery.
Tereshkova parachuted safely onto a farm instead when her capsule re-entered from orbit. As nearby farmers came up to say hello, Tereshkova shared her cosmonaut rations with them.
Instead of following up after Tereshkova’s record-setting three days in space, the Soviet Union after 1963 abandoned plans to send three more women cosmonauts into space who had trained with Tereshkova. Speaking in 2019 to a British audience, Tereshkova said that decision was “pure male chauvinism.” Tereshkova added that she and her team of women cosmonauts have remained close friends over the past 60 years.
Tereshkova after her three days and nights in space was made a national hero and de facto spokeswoman for the Soviet Union. Soviet poster boy Yuri Gagarin and Tereshkova toured the world together, signing autographs and drumming up support for Soviet space achievements. Her role as a national hero became even more unique after Gagarin’s death in 1968 while test piloting new aircraft for the Red Army.
NASA in 1978 finally responded to years of criticism and frustrated applicants seeking to become astronauts by recruiting and training the first class of non-whites and women to launch into space.
News of the NASA astronaut class that would include Sally Ride and Guion Buford spurred the Soviets to partner through its Intercosmos program with fellow Communist nations to launch the first non-white cosmonauts into space. This reactive on-upmanship resembled how lobbying of NASA by the “Mercury 13” group of American women ironically pressured Moscow to launch Tereshkova.
Thus in 1980, Pham Tuan of Vietnam became the first non-white human in space, followed that same year by Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez of Cuba, who has both Latino and African ancestry. Both Tuan and Mendez, each of whom were combat pilots and veterans of the Vietnam War, docked with the Soviet Salut-6 space station.
Moscow in 1982 then launched Svetlana Savitskaya into space to dock with the Salut-6 station, making her the second woman in space. During her second launch in 1984, Savitskaya also became the first woman to perform a spacewalk.
Moscow was smart to launch the first two female cosmonauts into space, but misogyny in the Soviet Union was pervasive as it is in Russia today. Savitskaya became the first woman to endure a sexist joke in Earth orbit, when the two male cosmonauts waiting for Savitskaya on Salut greeted their comrade with flowers, then later showed her an apron, joking that she should clean the space station kitchen.
NASA’s launches in 1983 of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and Guion “Guy” Bluford, the first African American in space, represented the start of a new era on their separate flights on the Space Shuttle Challenger. NASA after 1983 selected a steady representation of women and non-whites among its astronaut classes.
Sally Ride became a hero for American girls. Even my daughter has toy figures of Ride and Mae Jemison, who became the first Black woman in space in 1992 by launching on the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
NASA since Ride’s first flight in 1983 has launched more than 50 women into space. In a stark contrast, the Soviet space program and its successor Roscosmos have launched only five women cosmonauts — including Tereshkova and Savitskaya.
The forthcoming NASA Artemis missions for returning humans to the lunar surface, named after the Greek goddess of the moon and sister of the god Apollo, also showcase efforts by the agencyto project an image of inclusion.
Diversity in American spaceflight can still send a message that America is an inclusive force for good while also setting a higher standard for the global aerospace industry.
A great examples of aerospace diversity is engineer and former NASA astronaut Sandy Magnus, who between 2002 and 2011 made three trips into space on both the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station, where she was the first woman to be the ISS capsule communicator.
Magnus was my boss when I worked at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), writing for the group’s magazine Aerospace America. She has a great sense of humor.
Lack of awareness in the West about Tereshkova, Tuan and Mendez bothers me because spaceflight is an achievement for all humankind.
Vietnamese American friends whom I told about this story, for instance, felt proud and excited to learn that Pham Tun, a Vietnamese fighter pilot, was that the first non-white person in space.
We are all on the same team as our species pioneers space travel, and America’s greatness means nothing if we refuse to count the times when others win.
Declassified U.S. and Soviet documents dating back a century report that Moscow has consistently tried to steal American tech through government partnerships, but NASA and the Russian space program have still achieved great things together.
The American story is too often the only story, fueling a dangerous arrogance in our culture. Leaving out stories about the Soviets is also boring, depriving us from tales of amazing bravery, innovation, and endurance under the yoke of government repression.
Americans still honor plenty of heroes in aerospace who are not role models, even as the Soviets are too often ignored. Even favorable stories about the NASA Mercury astronauts that leave out their sexism towards women pilots recount their drunkenness and adultery.
Charles Lindbergh became the main celebrity opponent of U.S. involvement in the Second World War but is still celebrated as the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. The perception that he was a Nazi sympathizer damaged Lindbergh’s popularity but not his fame. American museums also honor numerous actual Nazis, including Werner Von Braun, the rocket scientist and Nazi SS member who helped kickstart NASA, and Luftwaffe officer Erich Warsitz, the world’s first jet pilot.
Reluctance to praise Soviet heroes during the Cold War passed through a brief thaw in the West that led to recognition of Yuri Gagarin. Valentina Tereshkova, however, is less popular than ever following her support of Vladimir Putin and his ongoing invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022.
Russia’s government has not kept pace with the decades of progress made by Americans on womens’ rights and civil rights, in part due to the repressive policies of Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Tereshkova has been among Putin’s strong supporters, which has cost her popularity among women in Russia who once admired her. She has been a spokeswoman for several Moscow regimes in the decades since her record-setting spaceflight, gathering honors along the way and becoming a member of Russia’s elite. Tereshkova retired as an admiral of the Russian Air Force and now serves as a member of Russia’s Duma. She voted in 2020 for parliament to exempt Putin from that nation’s constitution and potentially make him president for life.
The retired cosmonaut has paradoxically supported both Putin’s invasion of Ukraine while also telling the press that it’s better for nations to work together spending money on space travel instead of war.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has reduced Russia’s international influence and prestige to depths not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. That ongoing war could mean the Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is poised to end the U.S. partnership with Moscow in space, which has endured and advanced human spaceflight despite four decades of tumultuous relations between Moscow and Washington, DC.
Tereshkova has lived long enough to see herself become a villain, as the saying goes, yet her support for the infamous Soviet and Russian governments should not diminish the courage and endurance of the first woman to achieve spaceflight.
To help readers remember both Tereshkova and how NASA ignored the Mercury 13 women, I leave you with this British techno song “Valentina.” The song sounds super ’80s and Soviet but was made in 1997.
Remembering Tereshkova and the imperfect but effective achievements of Russia’s space program can inspire Americans to avoid the arrogance that led to NASA’s past mistakes and to create a more inclusive, open-minded community of aerospace innovators.
The first generation of astronauts and cosmonauts each took courageous risks in the name of science, even if their personal lives make them poor role models.
Valentina Tereshkova was there at the very start of the space age, bravely risking her life to explore the unknown. The women who followed her into space and all the girls dreaming of the stars will reshape humanity’s place in our galaxy.
