On June 16, 1963, a 26-year-old textile worker and amateur parachutist named Valentina Tereshkova launched from Baikonur aboard Vostok 6. Her call sign was Chaika—Seagull. She was the first woman in space, and she flew alone. Over three days she completed 48 orbits, at one point communicating with fellow cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky aboard Vostok 5, which had launched two days earlier. The spacecraft was largely automated; she manually oriented the capsule during orbit and prepared for a manual reentry if the automatic system failed. She landed under her own parachute—standard for Vostok missions—on June 19, near Karaganda. Soviet officials had originally planned a one-day flight but extended it to three after her performance proved solid. She was not a professional pilot, but she had logged 126 parachute jumps, and that mattered to Korolev’s design team: Vostok cosmonauts ejected from the capsule before landing. Tereshkova’s flight was propaganda and engineering both—but it was also a human being, alone in orbit, roughly 100 to 130 miles above Earth.