June 19, 1963: Valentina Tereshkova, back to camera, with her Vostok 6 capsule.

*****

The time:  June 19, 1963.   It marks the day of return dictated by the State Commission overseeing the simultaneous flights of Vostok 5 and Vostok 6, decided two days before.  The two flights will end today, first with the return of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in Vostok 6.  Followed two orbits later by the man launched ahead of her, Valery Bykovsky.

Of course observers in the West know little of this.  They still believed the flight program had called for the rendezvous of the two ships.  They saw that Vostok 5 had entered a lower than usual orbit and guess that as the reason the rendezvous was called off.

There was no planned rendezvous.  However, Western observers were correct, in part, in saying the flights had not met their goals.  Bykovsky’s flight was intended to last for eight days, but his low orbit was eroding too quickly to allow that. 

Tereshkova is flying the maximum duration designated for her flight, even though she appeared fatigued in TV images the previous day.   And on that day, again unknown in the West, she’d failed for obscure reasons to perform a test of manual control, vital in case the automatic orientation system failed to line up the spaceship for retrofire.  On landing morning, she tries again, and takes manual control successfully for 20 min., keeping Vostok 6 in the proper orientation for retrofire for a solid 15 min.  Controllers remain nervous as a retro time of 9:39 a.m., Moscow time, approaches.

On her 49th orbit, the automatic system correctly orients the spaceship, but Tereshkova does not report this to controllers, causing further anxiety.  Retrofire and reentry commence, again with no radio reports from Tereshkova.  At an altitude of 4 mi., like all Vostok pilots, she catapults from the heavy capsule and descends on a personal parachute.  The only mishap occurs when, against rules, she looks up at the parachute and is struck on the nose by a piece of metal.  Just a bruise, she later says.

At 11:20 a.m., Moscow time, she comes down in the steppes of Kazakhstan 380 mi. northwest of the city of Karaganda.  She has completed a flight of 2 days, 22 hr., 50 min. — nearly three full days.  And is met by farmers, and soon helicopters and planes carrying doctors, space officials and Russians journalists.  She takes a phone call from Soviet Premier Khrushchev, who told her, “You’re voice rings as if you had come from a party.”

Khrushchev later says, “Bourgeois society always emphasized that woman is the weaker sex.  That is not so.  Our Russian woman showed the American astronauts a thing or two.  Her mission was longer than than that of all the Americans put together.”

It will take 19 years before a Russian woman flies in space again, Svetlana Savitskaya.  She will launch aboard a Soyuz in 1982 to preempt the flight of the first American woman in space, Sally Ride.

Valery Bykovsky’s time to experience the fires of reentry arrives three hours after Tereshkova’s.  No hint will reach the West that he had difficultly on reentry.  Like Gagarin and Titov before him, his capsule’s instrument module fails to separate from the spherical crew cabin until straps burn through.  His reentry then proceeds normally culminating with ejection from the capsule and descent on his personal parachute.  He lands in a field  at 2:06 p.m., Moscow Time, 336 mi. northeast of Karaganda, 44 mi. from where Tereshkova touched Earth.

Vostok 5 had flown 81 orbits in 4 days, 23 hrs. 6 min., which still stands as the longest solo flight.  In his call to Bykovsky, Khrushchev congratulates him “for having glorified our homeland by your heroic flight.”

The Soviets issue a statement saying that both spaceships had functioned flawlessly.  “New valuable date have been obtained about the influence of different factors of a space flight of long duration on the organisms of man and woman.”   The flights were “a colossal technical success.”

Tereshkova’s propaganda duties do not end there.  On Nov. 3, 1963, she is married to Cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev, pilot of Vostok 3 in 1962.  Nikita Khrushchev attends the wedding.  As do a plethora of major space official.  Among them but unnamed is Vostok’s mysterious Chief Designer.