Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, became a media sensation. For headlines and prestige, they were immense triumphs. From an engineering point of view, they were simple, requiring no changes. There is another list of individual firsts along the way that had no particular operational reason for existing. Lives were risked, and sometimes lost, in a race for supremacy. Sending the first person into space, carrying out the first spacewalk, being the first to reach the moon, and the first to land on the moon - these were headline-grabbing moments that elevated the prestige of the country responsible. Space exploration is, after all, a product of the Cold War - a “Space Race” where beating the other superpower was the justification. Sally Ride’s long shadow, next to her astronaut flight jacket (photo: Francis French)įrom the very beginning, human spaceflight has been about firsts as much as technology.
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