Valentina Vladimifouna Tereshkova

Tereshkova, Valentina Vladimifouna (1937– ), Soviet cosmonaut, the first woman to orbit the earth. Simultaneously with a fellow cosmonaut, Very F. Bykovsky, she circled the earth 45 times in her spacecraft Vostok VI (June 16–19, 1963). Her orbits, which she controlled manually, took less than 1 1/2 hours each.