International Women's Day

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Today is international Women's day, and in a few more days it'll be mothers day where i'm from. It's certainly a good week for women!

I thought i'd spotlight some one probably very few of you know because it's worth knowing about the outstanding achievements of women outside of popular media.

Yuri Gagarin died far too young, but Valentina Tereshkova is still with us. I actually didn't realise that until today. I always thought of her as a historical figure. But, in fact, she just turned 81, she has been advocating for the creation of a planetary asteroid-defence system, and she is willing to sign up for a one-way ticket to Mars if a mission is put together.

One of the very few women selected to be cosmonauts in the Russian space program, Valentina became the first woman to make it into space where she piloted the Vostok 6 through 48 orbits in just over 70 hours. For comparison, the first woman from America to go to space was a full 20 years later in 1983.

During her one time solo flight piloting the Vostok 6, she encountered an error in the computer systems responsible for controlling the ascent and descent on her craft. Amazingly, she was able to re-program the computer system and successfully use it to return back to Earth. It wasn't until 2004 that this bug in the computer system was made public - the designer of the spaceship had requested that she kept quiet about it

And, of course, she was born just two days before International Women's Day. Because if you're going to be that bad-ass, you need a suitably bad-ass birthday!