For Women’s History Month DataViz Contest I wanted to create a chart that provides small insights into the history of women that travelled to space. This chart shows the 65 women with completed spaceflights. As a comparison, there are around 500 men that travelled to space until now, but this chart is not about a comparison between women and men. It’s about looking at these 65 women spacefarers and admiring their amazing accomplishments.
Valentina Tereshkova is the first woman in space, only two years after the first flight into space by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961. She is also the youngest woman in space, at only 26 years old. It’s interesting that 19 years separated the first and second woman in space. And even though the first two women in space were Russian, there were only four women of Russian nationality to fly in space until today.
Most women have ages between 30 and 45 on their first mission into space. Barbara Morgan, a teacher and an astronaut, travelled for the first time in space as a participant in the Teacher in Space program, when she was 55 years old.