Women were not allowed into NASA’s Astronaut Training Program before 1978. For this research paper, I will be discussing the first ten women who have taken trips out of this planet and details about their missions.
On June 16, 1963, Valentina V. Tereshkova was the first woman to ever go to space. She was also the youngest woman to go into space at 26 years of age. The former Russian cosmonaut piloted Vostok 6. She completed almost three days in space and orbited the Earth forty-eight times. Tereshkova had no experience at all as a pilot, but she was accepted into the Soviet Space Program because of her 126 parachute jumps. She had 18 months of training along with 4 other women, out of the 5 she was the only one who went into space.
The second …show more content…
on January 28, 1986. Seventy-three seconds into the flight, the space shuttle exploded in midair due to hydrogen leakage caused by faulty O-ring seals. Along with her six crew members, Resnik died in one of the worst space disasters in history.] (Cohen 2009)4.
Kathryn D. Sullivan became the first American female to walk in space. She is the fifth woman worldwide to fly into space. Sullivan flew three space shuttle missions during her 15 years on NASA. One of the flights Sullivan was in became the first flight to include two women. Sally Ride and Kathryn D. Sullivan were the two women in the STS-41G flight. During the STS-41G mission Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space.
The first mother in space was Anna Lee Fisher, she flew in the second launch of the space shuttle Discovery as a mission specialist. Fisher had said, "I wanted to make a statement that, 'yes I had a child, but I’m committed to this and I'm going to be here…” She was already assigned to the flight two weeks before delivering her baby. The crew on Discovery helped deploy two satellites. “… two satellites: Canada’s Anik D-2 (Telesat H) and Hughes’ LEASAT-1 (Syncom IV-1) and operated the Radiation Monitoring Equipment (RME) device and the 3M Company’s Diffusive Mixing of Organic Solutions (DMOS) experiment” (NASA 2014) They orbited the Earth 127 times and Fisher …show more content…
Dr. Seddon was a general surgeon and was working as an Emergency Department physician in multiple hospitals before she joined NASA. She flew on three space shuttle flights: STS-51D and STS-40 as a mission specialist and STS-58 as the Payload Commander. STS-51D Discovery, the crew conducted medical experiments, activated two “Getaway Specials”, and recorded experiments with toys in space. STS-40 Columbia, the team performed experiments to know more about how humans, animals, and cells responded to microgravity and how they re-adapted to Earth’s gravity on their way back. On Dr. Seddon’s last space mission STS-58 Columbia, the crew actually experimented on