Forgotten Toothbrush

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was the first woman in space. That was just one of her many accomplishments. She was a Russian engineer, member of the State Duma, as well as being a former Soviet cosmonaut. She flew a solo mission on Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963. During her flight, she orbited the Earth 48 times and spent almost three days in space. She is still the only woman to have been on a solo space mission and is the last surviving Vostok program cosmonaut. At the time of her solo mission, she was just 26 years old. To this day, she remains the youngest woman to have flown in space under the international definition of 100 km altitude, and the youngest woman to fly in Earth orbit. Her flight was an amazing feat, but there was one little hiccup on the mission. It was a small detail really, but seriously, it was a problem…at least for most people. She forgot her toothbrush!!

So, the first woman in space went without a toothbrush during her three days aboard the Vostok-6 spacecraft in 1963. What woman would go on a trip without her toothbrush, especially when there isn’t a store to go buy one. To be fair, it wasn’t her fault, because mission control was actually in charge of packing the essentials, because the pioneering cosmonaut had other, presumably more scientific, things to focus on. So, how could mission control forget such an essential. Well, I suppose they weren’t that used to the things the cosmonauts needed in space. The program was in the early stages, after all. I’m sure that when she went to get ready for the day and realized that she had no toothbrush, it was a real bummer. Still, I guess there could be more important things that could have been forgotten…things that might have been much more crucial, and their omission might have been a serious detriment to the mission.

Before her selection for the Soviet space program, Tereshkova, who was born on March 6, 1937, was a textile factory worker and an amateur skydiver. She joined the Air Force as part of the Cosmonaut Corps and became an officer after completing her training. When the first group of female cosmonauts disbanded in 1969, Tereshkova stayed in the space program as a cosmonaut instructor. She later graduated from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, re-qualified for spaceflight, but never returned to space. She retired from the Air Force in 1997 with the rank of major general.

Valentina married cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev on November 3, 1963, at the Moscow Wedding Palace, with Khrushchev attending the wedding party alongside top government and space program leaders. The Soviet space authorities encouraged the marriage as a “fairy-tale message to the country,” and General Kamanin, head of the space program, described it as “probably useful for politics and science.” On June 8, 1964, almost a year after her space flight, she gave birth to their daughter Elena Andrianovna Nikolaeva-Tereshkova, the first person whose parents had both been to space. Over time, the couple grew distant and avoided standing together in photographs. Their marriage ended in 1977, and they divorced in 1982. She later married Yuli Shaposhnikov, a surgeon she met during medical examinations to re-qualify as a cosmonaut, and they remained together until his death in 1999.