Valentina Tereshkova: The First Lady of Space: In Her Own Words by Valentina Tereshkova

Author:Valentina Tereshkova [Tereshkova, Valentina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B017081QG6
Goodreads: 27824522
Publisher: SpaceHistory101.com Press
Published: 2015-11-04T07:00:00+00:00

IN THE FAMILY OF STAR BROTHERS

Let me tell you, when I entered the "Star City" of cosmonauts, my heart was about to stop. How will they meet me there? I didn't do anything great in my life; in fact, I didn't see much of a real life and these were real pilots and two of them, Gagarin and Titov, were heroes whose names were known all over the world.

And what about us girls? Well, we jumped with parachutes, new small planes. That's all we did. But I tried to be calm.

The hall we entered was quite empty. We looked around. The walls were covered with the pictures of cosmonauts training, class schedules, schemes, and graphs. How complicated they seemed to us at that time! Our nervousness calmed down after a while. We even turned on the television in the corner of the room and started to watch some program. And then the guys came. They came in a big group, all neatly dressed. All of them were officers. We felt a little awkward but this lasted for only a minute because one of the guys approached and simply said, “Let’s be friends, girls. My name is…” And he told us his name. It was German Titov. Then the rest introduced themselves, too. We were shaking their strong hands, called out our names, answered their questions, and laughed at their jokes.

At this time I can’t recall many details of the day we all met. But this is not so important. What was important is that the men accepted us. At this moment our friendship started. It helped us later when the lessons and the training started.

Within two or three days we knew all our colleagues. Yury Gagarin, German Titov, Andriyan Nikolayev, Pavel Popvitch, my future space partner Valery Bykovsky, the future cosmonauts Number 7, 8, 9, and 12 became our best friends.

Later I vas thinking many times about this first meeting, asking myself: what impression did they make on me, those who were ready to fly to the stars? Modesty. Perhaps this was the feature of everyone. They also were united by openness and their passion for their work, their profession. This passion gave them strength and helped to overcome hardships and barriers. And there were lots of challenges. Among them was a question: can a woman fly to space?

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