The Vostok 6 flight
During almost three days the spacecraft completed 48 orbits of Earth. Tereshkova carried out experiments, photographed Earth and recorded flight observations; the mission ended on 19 June 1963.
Selection
Before her selection, Tereshkova worked in the textile industry and was a parachutist. The Soviet programme selected and trained a group of candidates for spaceflight. Hers remained the only spaceflight among those candidates.
A clarification about Mercury 13
In the United States a group of women had taken medical tests similar to those of the Mercury astronauts. According to NASA and ESA, this privately funded project was not an official NASA programme recruiting female astronauts.