RUSSIA has celebrated the 55th anniversary of Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space. To this day, she remains the only female ever to have embarked on a solo space mission.

The incredibly brave Tereshkova was just 26 years old when she left Earth for her historic voyage on the USSR’s Vostok 6 spacecraft, which lasted three days and orbited the planet 48 times.

Tereshkova, now 81, told Roscosmos that the only time she felt nervous was when she spoke to her mother from the spacecraft. “My heart flinched only when I spoke to my mother… that’s when my voice started to tremble,” she said.

Tereshkova wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, including her mother, about her groundbreaking space flight, so she instead said that she had “been approved for the national team in parachuting.” When her mom finally found out the truth, she said three simple words to Tereshkova: “you tricked me.”

The little white lie wasn’t too far-fetched, as Tereshkova was chosen out of 400 civilian candidates partly due to her parachuting experience. That quality was valued at the time, because cosmonauts needed to parachute from their capsules at about 2,000 meters on their return to Earth.

While Tereshkova — who later became a politician and married a cosmonaut — had no shortage of courage, it turns out her mission was even riskier than initially believed. Although it’s now known that humans need about seven days to get used to space, that fact was unknown at the time and therefore she did not undergo the same preparation as she would today.

Tereshkova’s adventures did not end in space.

She was nearly killed when a would-be assassin opened fire in January 1969 on a limousine that he thought was carrying the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

The car was taking Tereshkova and three fellow cosmonauts to a Kremlin event.

More than 40 women from the United States have gone into space since Tereshkova but only one other Russian has made it — Yelena Kondakova in 1994 and 1997.

(SD-Agencies)

RUSSIA has celebrated the 50th anniversary of the flight of the first woman in space - a Soviet national hero who went by the call name "Seagull" and captured the imaginations of girls around the world.

Valentina Tereshkova, now a lawmaker for Russia’s ruling party, blasted off in a Vostok-6 spaceship 50 years ago on Sunday, two years after Yuri Gagarin’s historic first manned flight in 1961.

The 76-year-old remains the only woman to have ever made a solo flight in space.

“The importance of this event is impossible to overestimate in the history of Russian and world space travel,” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in a congratulatory message to Tereshkova.

State television celebrated by running documentaries about Ms Tereshkova’s life while the former cosmonaut herself spent the day commemorating a new space museum in her native region of Yaroslavl.

“You have to love your country - love it so hard that your heart is ready to stop,” Ms Tereshkova said in a documentary aired on Russia’s state rolling news channel.

Soviet authorities in April 1962 had initially whittled down their list to five prospective candidates as they competed against the United States for space supremacy during the Cold War.

Their choice eventually settled on textile factory worker Ms Tereshkova - the child of a peasant family and a Communist Youth leader who had already performed 90 parachute jumps.

Ms Tereshkova was not allowed to confide even in family members who only learned of her exploits when Moscow announced it to the world.

She circled Earth 48 times during her three-day mission.

In recent years, press speculation has said she was space sick for much of this time and unable to perform basic functions or respond to commands from ground control.

But Ms Tereshkova blamed everything on how computer software had been programmed and she denied feeling ill during the flight.

“A problem appeared on the first day of the flight,” Ms Tereshkova told a press conference last week.

“Due to a technical error, the spaceship was programmed not for a landing but for taking the ship into a higher orbit,” she said.