#32: The First Female Astronauts
Space exploration is always full of a lot of firsts and big milestones. Let’s take a minute to show appreciation to some female astronauts who are breaking records and setting new precedents. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she flew a solo mission on June 16, 1963. To this day, she remains the only woman to have conducted a solo space mission.
Then we have physicist and astronaut Sally Ride, who became the first American woman to go to space. She went to space as a NASA astronaut in 1983, twenty years after Valentina did so. Despite the two decades between the two women, Valentina and Sally were only two of the three women who had been in space up until that point. There are still plenty of glass ceilings to break where space exploration is concerned.