Fifty years ago today, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly into space.

She blasted off in a Vostok-6 spaceship at the age of 26 and to this day remains the only woman to have made a solo space flight.

Two years earlier, Yuri Gagarin made the first manned flight.

In a top-secret process that started in 1962 officials narrowed down the candidates for the flight to five.

The candidates included two engineers, one school teacher, one typist and Ms Tereshkova, a factory worker who had performed 90 parachute jumps.

She had grown up in a peasant family and was a Communist Youth (Komsomol) leader at her textile factory in the historic city of Yaroslavl, around 280 kilometres from Moscow.

After seven months of intensive training, Ms Tereshkova was chosen for the historic flight.

On June 16, 1963, she blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and circled Earth 48 times during her three day mission.

Another Soviet spaceship, Vostok-5, was already in orbit and Ms Tereshkova communicated with its pilot Valery Bykovsky from day one.

She even sang him songs, but their communication was then interrupted as the two spaceships moved further away from each other.

Glitches exposed decades later

Ms Tereshkova was told to cover up glitches she experienced during her solo space mission in 1963. ( AFP: Natalia Kolesnikova )

There were a number of glitches during the flight which were only made public after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"A problem appeared on the first day of the flight," Ms Tereshkova said at a press conference in Star City, home to a cosmonaut training centre, earlier this month.

"Due to a technical error, the spaceship was programmed not for a landing but for taking the ship into a higher orbit," she said.

It meant that the ship was heading further and further away from Earth.

The error was corrected, but Ms Tereshkova was told not to tell anyone.

"I kept the secret for 30 years," she said.

Ms Tereshkova wrote in her official report that her spacesuit hurt her leg and her helmet weighed down her shoulders.

She also said she vomited during the flight and there were several problems with the landing.

Soviet general Nikolai Kamanin later revealed that communications were cut off just before descent began and Ms Tereshkova had difficulty in guiding her spaceship.

Ms Tereshkova catapulted out of her space capsule, as was then standard procedure, and parachuted down to land in Altai in southern Siberia.

But mission control did not know Ms Tereshkova's location for two hours after she landed, spaceship constructor Boris Chertok admitted in his memoirs.

Rescuers finally found her tens of kilometres away from the expected spot.

The landing left Ms Tereshkova with a bruise on her nose which was covered up with make-up at official ceremonies.

Tereshkova remembered as 'woman of the century'

In 1982, Svetlana Savitskaya from the Soviet Union became the second woman to go into space and one year later in 1983, American Sally Ride followed suit.

Since then more than 40 women from the US have gone into space, but just one other Russian, Yelena Kondakova, in 2004 and 2007.

At the moment, would-be cosmonaut, Yelena Serova, 36, is training for a six-month mission to the International Space Station next year.

Ms Serova says Ms Tereshkova is "the woman of the century".

"If all goes well and my flight goes ahead, that will be a signal to encourage more and more women to try their strength in space," she said.

Ms Tereshkova made just one space flight.

Several months afterwards, she married a cosmonaut, Andriyan Nikolayev, and in 1964 she gave birth to a daughter Yelena.

The couple later divorced and Ms Tereshkova remarried.

After occupying various honorific roles during the Soviet period, at 76 Ms Tereshkova is a politician for the ruling United Russia party.

But her adventurous spirit remains: she said this month that she would be "ready" to fly to Mars, even if it were a one-way trip.

AFP