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Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space, with her medals.
Look at all dem medals…haters gonna hate
If Amelia Earhart were alive today, there is a good chance she would be a NASA astronaut.
Charles F. Bolden, Administrator of NASA (via crookedindifference)
Time traveling Amelia Earhart historical fan fiction GO
Tam O’Shaughnessy, life partner of Sally Ride, moments before she accepts the Presidential Medal of Freedom on behalf of the first female American astronaut. Yesterday (20 Nov.) the medal was posthumously awarded to Ride for her work in science and education. Sally Ride is the first female NASA individual to be awarded this medal*.
* The Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team as a whole was also rewarded this medal, their award was presented as a group award. I have not been able to find out who the women on this team were.
"Svetlana Savitskaya in Outer Space" by Vladimir Dzhanibekov, taken on 25 July 1984 during the Soyuz-12 flight. Honourable mention in the Arts and Sciences category, 1984.
Some of the most dramatic images submitted throughout the history of the World Press Photo Contest
Source: ITAR-TASS
This photo, taken during the Soyuz T-12 mission to Salyut 7, depicts the first spacewalk ever made by a woman. Savitskaya was joined by Commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Research Cosmonaut Igor Volk, who was aboard in order to gain flight experience—Volk was to be the commander of the first manned Buran flight, and flight doctrine maintained that every flight had to have at least one spaceflight veteran.
They take care of me as their own younger sister in life, but I wish to be their comrade-in-arms.
It was merely a month ago that we were jointly celebrating two occasions: Liu Yang becoming China’s first female taikonaut, and the twenty-ninth anniversary of Sally Ride’s inaugural voyage on the Challenger shuttle, the one that made her the third woman to go to space, and the first one to be put there by the American space program. Yesterday evening we received the sad news: Sally Ride has succumbed to pancreatic cancer after a two-year illness, dying at the age of sixty-one.
As the privileged temporary inhabitants of humanity’s outpost in space, we will make every effort to share the orbital perspective and virtually take along all those who want to join our journey.
Astronaut Kalpana Chawla would have turned 51 today.
Kalpana still inspires women to dream today - as she did, in the literal meaning of her name.
From this article written by Pameljit Kaur Kalra:
Kalpana dared to dream a dream so different from everyone around. In Kalpana’s own words, “It was very far-fetched to think I’d get to fly on the space shuttle - because I lived in India, in a very small town. And forget about space, I didn’t even know if my folks were going to let me go to the engineering college.” From Karnal to Space, the journey seems formidably long. But she achieved it. Her success, in my opinion does not come from the fact that she went to space. It comes from her struggle against what her context was during that time to make a fantasy come true.
Whenever I think that something is too grand to dream about, I think of the petite woman who harbored dreams of going to space one day. And that is when; I regain my child-like enthusiasm for life, the courage to dream bigger than I can possibly think and the perseverance to make that a reality.
Yi So-Yeon signing the wall of the helicopter that picked Peggy Whitson, Yuri Malenchenko and her up after landing in Kazakhstan in 2008.
The Soyuz TMA-11 landing was the first time since the flight of Valentina Tereshkova that women outnumbered men on a spacecraft. They had a rough ride home since the propulsion module failed to separate from the reentry module, a failure which also happened on the TMA-1 and TMA-10. Althought TMA-1 and TMA-10 were all male crews, Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, still managed to show sexist bigotry when he blamed the number of women aboard for the failure.
“Even among our space-colleagues there were men wondering why we needed to weld and said that we might burn each other`s space suits or the spaceship`s exterior. It is a great responsibility, If I listen to their concerns, then people could have said that surely it was not something women should do. But after my spaceflight, everyone had to shut up.”
Svetlana Savitskaya - first woman to walk in space.
