RETURN TO EARTH

Described by some western observers as resembling a tougher-looking Ingrid Bergman, rumours would abound for decades that Tereshkova’s mission had not gone well and, even, that she handled her return to Earth badly. Still, with radioed guidance from Gagarin, Titov and Nikolayev, she had managed to orient her spacecraft by manual control in a 20-minute-long experiment just before retrofire and successfully held the correct re-entry attitude. At 10:34:40 am Moscow Time on 19 June, the retrofire command was sent to Vostok 6 and executed 20 minutes later. However, the cosmonaut herself did not call out each event as required: she did not report a successful solar orientation, nor did she report the progress of the retrofire procedure, nor even the jettisoning of her spacecraft’s instrument section. In fact, the only information coming in to the control centre was downlinked telemetry data.

Tereshkova ejected on time, but apparently broke a mission rule by opening her helmet faceplate and gazing upwards; she was hit by a small piece of falling metal, it is said, which cut her face. Barely missing a lake in the violently-gusting wind, she landed at 11:20 am, some 620 km north-east of Karaganda, on the 53rd parallel. The bland fare she had eaten over the past three days was replaced, thanks to kindly locals, by fermented milk, cheese, flat cakes and bread, although this ruined the physicians’ chances of properly analysing her dietary intake. Three hours later, at 2:06 pm, after ejecting from Vostok 5, Bykovsky touched down 540 km to the north­west of the mining city and on the same parallel as Tereshkova. Unfortunately, in a worrying recurrence of the Vostok 1 and 2 problems, his instrument section failed to separate cleanly from the capsule, causing wild gyrations until the aerodynamic heating of re-entry finally burned the restraining straps away.

Little of this was evident in Bykovsky’s post-mission report. “The solar orientation for retrofire worked correctly,’’ he recalled, “and the braking engine fired for 39 seconds. Immediately after shutdown of the engine, the capsule separated from the service module. There were no big G forces during re-entry. There was a powerful explosion when the cabin hatch blew off” – it would appear that Bykovsky, too, ‘chose’ to eject – “and I was ejected from the capsule in my seat two seconds later. . . ’’ After landing, he was greeted by a man on horseback and a car which drove him to the charred Vostok 5, lying a couple of kilometres away. With a mission elapsed time of some 119 hours, just shy of five full days, he had set a new

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record for the longest solo manned spaceflight, which still remains unbroken. Tereshkova, too, had firmly ground all of America’s Mercury astronauts beneath her heel in terms of space time: her 48 orbits of Earth and 70 hours aloft soundly surpassed all six of their missions combined.

Khrushchev loved it. A few days later, in Moscow, he declared that, unlike bourgeois society’s emphasis on women as representing the weaker sex, the Soviet system permitted them to prosper and, literally, reach for the stars. Although the reality was decidedly more insincere, Tereshkova, for her part, agreed with him. “Since 1917,’’ she said, “Soviet women have had the same prerogatives and rights as men. They share the same tasks. They are workers, navigators, chemists, aviators, engineers. . . and now the nation has selected me for the honour of being a cosmonaut. On Earth, at sea and in the sky, Soviet women are the equal of men.’’ Many observers in the west agreed. The wife of Philip Hart, the Democratic senator for Michigan, remarked that Russia was providing its women with a chance that American women simply did not have. Others, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, added that “the Russians treat men and women interchangeably. We treat men and women differently’’.

The purely propagandist nature of the mission would be shown up, however, by the fact that no more Soviet women would venture into space until 1982. Even a decade after Tereshkova’s flight, fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov told an interviewer that her results indicated that “for women, flying in space is a hard job and they can do other things down here. After training, she will be 28 or 29 and if she is a good woman, she will have a family by then’’. Clearly, the real motivation of the Soviets in putting a woman into orbit was different from how it was presented to

– and, surprisingly, accepted by – the rest of the world. Andrian Nikolayev, who married Tereshkova in a lavish ceremony presided over by Khrushchev at the Moscow Wedding Palace on 3 November 1963, shared Leonov’s sentiment. “The mission programme makes big demands on her, especially if she is married,’’ Nikolayev said, “so nowadays we keep our women here on Earth. We love our women very much; we spare them as much as possible. However, in the future, they will surely work on board space stations, but as specialists – as doctors, as geologists, as astronomers and, of course, as stewardesses!’’

Whatever Tereshkova’s own opinions on the matter of future female space travellers, she dived with vigour into her post-flight life on the international speaking circuit, touring India, Pakistan, Mexico, the United States, Cuba, Poland, Bulgaria and elsewhere, assuming dozens of ceremonial posts and moving into the office of the president of the Committee of Soviet Women on Pushkin Square in Moscow. Like the other cosmonauts, she was honoured as a Hero of the Soviet Union, together with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star Medal. Five months after Vostok 6, amid much pomp and circumstance, she wed Nikolayev, previously the only bachelor cosmonaut. Apparently, their romance had developed during training

– one story told that she kissed him farewell at the foot of the Vostok 3 gantry – and at the wedding, a beaming Khrushchev himself gave the bride away. The truth, it seemed, was very different. Although a daughter, Yelena, was born to the couple in June 1964, becoming the first child whose parents had both flown into space,

Nikolayev and Tereshkova were not even living together by the end of that same year. They divorced in 1982. To this day, speculation exists as to whether or not their marriage represented a genuine love match or a cynical ploy engineered by Khrushchev.

Tereshkova herself has always argued vehemently against allegations that she performed poorly during her flight, saying only that she suffered from fatigue and lack of sleep. Sergei Korolev had already been heard to mutter that he would not deal with “broads” again and, at a private interview with her on 11 July 1963, he expressed severe displeasure with her performance. His anger was shared by his deputy, Vasili Mishin, who claimed that she had been “on the edge of psychological instability”. In fact, whilst drafting the official press release a few weeks earlier, the head of medical preparations, Vladimir Yazdovsky, had suggested including a paragraph to explain Tereshkova’s “overwhelming emotions”, coupled with tiredness and a sharply reduced ability to complete all of her assigned tasks. He was persuaded not to do so by Kamanin. Other rumours hint that she experienced significant menstruation whilst in orbit and at one stage became hysterical and began crying uncontrollably until she was scolded by Korolev over the radio.

Two decades later, in June 1983, shortly before the launch of America’s first woman into space, Time magazine speculated that perhaps Tereshkova’s poor preparation for the mission had contributed to the Soviets’ decision not to fly female cosmonauts more frequently. Despite these apparent slurs on her ability, it was revealed in 2004 that an error in Vostok 6’s control software had made the spacecraft ascend from orbit instead of descending; Tereshkova had noticed the fault during her first day aloft and had reported it to Korolev. She then calmly entered data to repair the mistake and landed safely. None of this was made public for more than four decades.

After her flight, Tereshkova would remain for many years a member of the cosmonaut corps, though in a purely honorific capacity, with little chance of another flight. She would study at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, graduating in October 1969 with distinction as a professional engineer, before learning of the dissolution of the female cosmonaut team later that year. To be fair, she and her female colleagues were never truly considered ‘regular’ members of the corps and the availability of flight assignments for them, realistically, ended shortly after Vostok 6. The entire woman-in-space effort was, for Korolev, simply a means of currying favour with Khrushchev: providing him with yet another propaganda coup to upstage the Americans, in exchange for signing off plans for the ‘real’ space programme to continue. That space programme would take two paths after Vostok: an improved version of the capsule (Voskhod) would fly from 1964 onwards with crews of up to three cosmonauts for long-duration and spacewalking exercises and an entirely new (Soyuz) spacecraft would be inaugurated shortly thereafter to pave the way for Earth-circling space stations and manned journeys to the Moon.