The First Woman In Earth Orbit

摘要

Valentina Tereshkova's condition seemed to deteriorate into her third day in orbit. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of her performance was her fumbled attempt to orient the spacecraft at the beginning of her third day in orbit, an exercise she was originally scheduled to perform early in the mission on the second orbit. She tried to perform attitude control twice (apparently on the 38th orbit) and openly admitted that she was not able to orient along the pitch axis. Not surprisingly, this made controllers on the ground anxious since, if for some reason she had to manually control attitude during the descent, then a failure on her part could seriously jeopardise her return. In part two of this article, we join Tereshkova at 1737 hours on her 37th orbit, as she acknowledges a message from Gagarin instructing her on how to carry out the attitude control experiment on the following orbit.