Female Astronauts Who Pioneered the Spaceflights

In the past half-century, just over 60 women have flown in space. In contrast, more than 500 men have made the trip during that same period.

Clearly, Earth’s space agencies have a long way to go to reach gender equality. However, among the women who have flown to space, their lifetime accomplishments are often staggering and their missions ground-breaking. From the first female astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, to the current roster of spacefarers, here are a few of the most important female spaceflight pioneers of all time.

Valentina Tereshkova

Valentina Tereshkova was the first female astronaut to venture to space. She was born in Bolshoye Maslennikovo, USSR, in 1937, and she worked in a factory when she was young. Over time, she fell in love with skydiving. And in 1963, at just 26 years old, she piloted the Vostok 6 spacecraft around Earth alone, orbiting our planet for 48 hours.

The next woman to fly in space didn't blast off until nearly 20 years after Tereshkova’s maiden flight. And no woman has carried out a solo spaceflight since. Even Tereshkova never flew again. She spent the rest of her career training male cosmonauts, eventually rising to the rank of an Air Force major general before changing careers to become a politician.

Svetlana Savitskaya

Svetlana Savitskaya was just the second woman to reach space. She was also a record-breaking jet pilot. Savitskaya was born in Moscow in 1948 and likewise started skydiving as a teenager. Her father, a high-ranking officer in the Soviet military, was allegedly unaware of her skydiving exploits. However, he soon supported her passion for flying jets, and Savitskaya quickly found herself competing in aerobatic competitions.

In 1970, while she was still in her early 20s, Savitskaya won the prestigious competition: the World Aerobatic Championship. That flying prowess helped her earn a spot as a cosmonaut, and she went on to earn her astronaut wings in 1982. That made her just the second woman to travel to space, following Tereshkova’s in 1963. Unlike Tereshkova, however, Savitskaya did get to fly a second time, making her the first woman to travel to space multiple times.

Sally Ride

Sally Ride was the first American woman to fly in space. In 1978, she finished her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University and simultaneously was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA. Then, after five years of training, she finally flew on Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983. Her flight came just less than a year after Svetlana Savitskaya became the second woman to fly to space. Ride flew on Challenger again in 1984.

After the Challenger disaster in 1986, Ride served on the team that investigated the cause of the explosion. She was also involved in the investigation of Space Shuttle Columbia's crash. Ride was a major driving force in motivating young women to pursue science, and she devoted the final years of her career to the cause. Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

Christa McAuliffe

Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school social studies teacher, died tragically in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. But although McAuliffe never reached space, her legacy still lives on today. In 1985, McAuliffe was chosen by NASA for their Teacher in Space Project. She was selected as a way for the space agency to honour teachers while simultaneously encouraging students to go into STEM careers.

Once McAullife reached orbit, the plan was to have her teach lessons to school kids around the country. Instead, the first teacher in space, alongside her six fellow astronauts, died when Space Shuttle Challenger exploded moments after leaving the launchpad. NASA continues to incorporate education into nearly everything it does today, and the space agency even carried out McAuliffe’s original orbital lesson plans in 2016.

Kalpana Chawla

Kalpana Chawla was the first astronaut of Indian descent. She was born in Karnal, India, in 1962. Chawla’s father helped foster her passion for flying by taking her to local flying clubs when she was young. Eventually, she left India and moved to the U.S. to pursue advanced degrees in engineering. After earning two master's degrees, she earned a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In 1988, just after graduating, she became a NASA researcher. Her research focused on vertical take-off and landing concepts, which are now being pioneered by major new spaceflight companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. In 1994, Chawla was selected as an astronaut candidate. She flew into space two different times aboard Space Shuttle Columbia. But during her second flight, Columbia exploded as it returned to Earth. Chawla and six fellow astronauts were killed on February 1, 2003.

Peggy Whitson

Peggy Whitson holds the impressive designation of having spent more time in space than any other American astronaut. NASA selected Whitson as an astronaut candidate in 1996, but she’d already been working for the space agency as a scientist, studying how the challenges of outer space affect living things.

Between 2002 and 2017, Whitson had three long hauls on the International Space Station, where she spent 665 cumulative days in space. During that time, she also served as commander and helped perform hundreds of science experiments.

While more and more women are being incorporated in Space ventures, there’s no denying that it is still not enough and that we have a long way ahead to bridge that gender gap. In fact, National Geographic presented that in the 58 years that Earthlings have launched humans into orbit, about 11 percent of them 63 individuals have been women.

“An all-female mission tends to be something that NASA has avoided in assignments because it seems like a stunt,” says Margaret Weitekamp, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum. But in some ways, women are potentially better suited for space travel than men.

First, the weight advantage: Sending lighter humans into space is just plain smart because rocketing weight into space, and maneuvering once you’re there, requires fuel, which costs money. “Some of us have speculated for years that having an all-female crew or at least a crew of smaller individuals would be advantageous from the total-mission-weight standpoint,” says Wayne Hale, former NASA engineer, and space shuttle program manager.

Sending six smaller women into space for months or years could be significantly less expensive than sending six burly dudes, and lower body weights are just a small part of it. The rest of the difference comes from the amount of food, oxygen, and other resources needed to keep smaller humans alive. For a short-duration trip, the difference might be negligible. But if you’re aiming for Mars or the stars- the contrast between sending enough food for a large man versus a small woman could end up being substantial because, on average, men require 15 to 25 percent more calories a day than women.

It’s a difference that Kate Greene observed in 2013 while participating in a four-month-long simulated mission in a Mars habitat. Part of Greene’s assignment was to monitor the metabolic output of her crewmates and on average, she reported, females expended less than half the calories of their male counterparts, despite similar activity levels.

In a research report titled ‘The Impact of Sex and Gender on Adaptation to Space’, sex was defined as “the classification of male or female according to an individual’s genetics.” Gender was defined as “a person’s self-representation as male or female based upon social interactions.” So far, when NASA has sent individuals into space, it has identified their sex, made no reference to their gender self-representation, and steered clear of the related matter of sexual orientation.

Above Earth’s protective magnetic shield, exposure to damaging radiation occurs more quickly, causing an increased risk of cancer and other issues. Fluids shift, immune responses decline, a handful of genes substantially change their expression patterns, and, problematically, eyesight enigmatically deteriorates.

Since the earliest days of the Mercury program, NASA has been gleaning medical data from its astronauts by studying their physiological responses to spaceflight. In 2014 the space agency released a large report compiled from decades of data. “It’s only been recently that we’ve had multiple women flying on missions,” so the findings on sex-based disparities are preliminary, says Virginia Wotring of the Centre for Space Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

In the few studies that have been done to identify factors in long-duration missions’ success or failure, scientists observed teams that experienced stressful Earth analogs such as desert survival treks, polar expeditions, and Antarctic winter-overs. They found that men tend to excel in shorter-term, goal-oriented situations, while women are better in longer-term, habitation-type circumstances.

“People in habitation situations have to be more interpersonally sensitive. You have to notice, be more communicative,” says Sheryl Bishop, a University of Texas Medical Branch psychologist who specializes in studying group behaviour. “Women are acculturated to have a lot of those skills to begin with.” That doesn’t mean men can’t get along well on long-duration space missions; it just means that the traits crucial for success on those missions are more typically associated with women.

In the early years of space travel, one group of researchers said women were advised not to operate any complicated machines while on their period. When the US’s first female astronaut, Sally Ride, was going on a seven-day stay in space, she was offered 100 tampons along with a make-up bag. Even today, space radiation shields designed for women struggle to fit the female body.

However, there have recently been signs that things are getting better. Space agencies are accepting more women onto their astronaut training programmes and are starting to learn from the experiences of those who have already visited space.