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Space firsts facts

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Space firsts facts

Space firsts facts

  • Russia's Valentina Tereshkova became the first women in space. She boarded Vostok 6 in June 1963 and orbited the earth 48 times on a mission lasting nearly three days. Her training had been kept so secret that even her mother didn't know until news of the flight was announced on radio.

  • The first walk in space was by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. On March 18, 1965 he ventured outside his Voskhod spacecraft, but it nearly ended in disaster. He struggled to re-enter the airlock in his bulky, rigid spacesuit and had to bleed air in order to make it back into the ship.

  • Neil Armstrong and Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin were the first men on the moon, on 20 July 1969. Though later missions saw their colleagues driving buggies and playing golf, Armstrong and Aldrin only spent two and a half hours on the lunar surface, mostly gathering rocks.

  • Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space in May 1991, when she visited the Mir Space Station as a cosmonaut of the Russian space program. Her 18-month training program included astronavigation. In an emergency she might have had to steer the spacecraft, using the stars as a map.

  • John Glenn had been the first American to orbit Earth in 1962 and, after 36 years, he returned to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998. Aged 77, Glenn was the first senior citizen in space. On the mission he acted as a guinea pig for experiments examining the effects of weightlessness on the body.

  • Dennis Tito opened a new chapter in space exploration in April 2001 when he became the first paying space tourist, as a guest of the Russian space programme. He blasted off from Kazakhstan with two cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz rocket, and visited the International Space Station.

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