Word: tereshkova
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...Russian cosmonaut whose 1962 space flight set an endurance record; in Cheboksary, Chuvash Autonomous Republic. Nikolayev circled the earth 64 times in 96 hours in his record-breaking flight, during which he also became the first man in orbit to appear live on television. In 1963 he married Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, reportedly to help the Soviets study the effects of space travel on human reproduction. The couple bore two children, but divorced...
...first woman in space, or even the first American woman. Those honors went to the Soviet Union's Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and America's Sally Ride (1983). But Judith ("J.R.") Resnik may have been the most doggedly determined astronaut, male or female, ever to suit up. "I want to do everything there is to be done," she once said, and she came close to her goal. A gourmet cook and classical pianist ("I never play anything softly") with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, she was working on a pilot's license before she died...
Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who in 1963 became the first woman in space, was sick for most of her three days in or bit, and is reported to have panicked when she became ill. In 1970 her husband Andrian Nikolayev was one of two cosmonauts who set an 18-day space endurance record, in a craft that they could not stop from rotating, sometimes as often as one turn every six seconds. As a result, the cosmonauts on their return to earth had to be lifted from their couches and carried to an ambulance. The first Soviet space mission fatality occurred...
Attractive and svelte at age 46, Tereshkova today is divorced from the fellow cosmonaut she married after the flight. She remains a popular public figure and has taken on such ceremonial chores as addressing a huge peace rally in Moscow's Olympic stadium last month. But if Tereshkova's mission was so successful, why did the Soviets wait 19 years before they sent a second woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, 34, into orbit last summer...
...apparent explanation: Tereshkova's highly touted odyssey, which seems to have been ordered by Khrushchev personally, was a technical flop. A millworker by profession, she was poorly prepared (she had done only some amateur parachute jumping) and, according to word from Soviet defectors, became severely ill during the flight. Indeed, even as she was being strapped into her Vostok capsule, as a last-minute replacement for the original woman candidate, she complained of feeling sick and dizzy. But with Khrushchev looking over their shoulders, Soviet space officials sent the reluctant Tereshkova...