Record Women in Space For NASA

By: Rob Adams
04/06/2010 09:23 AM ET

Record women in space came as a surprise for NASA. The agency had been so focused on the mission that it broke a 50-year record. The first woman in space was launched into orbit by the Soviet Union nearly 50 years ago.

“Maybe that’s a credit to the system, right, that I don’t think of it as male or female?” Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said in a statement. “I just think of it as a talented group of people going to do their job in space.”

NASA was unaware of the pending milestone until it was pointed out at a press conference. One thing for sure, the agency doesn’t have a problem with diversity. The latest Space Shuttle mission is one of the last.

Space Shuttle Discovery has three women onboard while another is already at the International Space Station (ISS). The crew on Discovery includes Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, 34, Stephanie Wilson, 43, and Naoko Yamazaki, 39. They are due to dock at the ISS on Wednesday, linking up with Tracy Caldwell Dyson, 40.

Although 13 American women passed the same NASA training tests in 1963, the space agency refused to admit women as astronauts until 1978. Twenty years later, the first American woman to go into orbit was Sally Ride. The new milestone sets the total to 54 women for space flight.

First Woman In Orbit

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova is the first woman in space. She is a retired Soviet cosmonaut. Out of more than four hundred applicants and then out of five finalists, she was selected to pilot Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963.

The mission lasted three days in space. She performed various tests on herself to collect data on the female body’s reaction to space flight. Most of that data is still being used today.

Before being recruited as a cosmonaut, Tereshkova was a textile-factory assembly worker and an amateur parachutist. After the female cosmonaut group was dissolved in 1969, she became a prominent member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, holding various political offices. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she retired from politics but remains revered as a hero in Russia.

Sally Ride

Dr. Sally Kristen Ride became the first American woman to enter space in 1983. She is an American physicist and a former NASA astronaut. She joined NASA in 1978. In 1987, she left NASA to work at Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Ride was one of 8,000 people to answer an advertisement in a newspaper seeking applicants for the space program. As a result, Ride joined NASA. During her career, Ride served as the ground-based Capsule Communicator (CapCom) for the second and third Space Shuttle flights (STS-2 and STS-3) and helped develop the Space Shuttle’s robot arm.

In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and Director of the California Space Institute. In 2003, she was asked to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board. She is the President and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she founded in 2001. The company creates entertaining science programs and publications for upper elementary and middle school students.

Space Shuttle Discovery

Space Shuttle Discovery is one of the three orbiters in operation for the United States. It joined the Space Shuttle fleet of NASA in 1984. The two other operational orbital vehicles are Atlantis and Endeavour.

Discovery is now the oldest orbiter in service. The vehicle has performed both research and International Space Station (ISS) assembly missions. The spacecraft takes its name from four British ships of exploration named Discovery from 1776 to 1779.