When Barbie Went To Space Trivia Quiz

Valentina Tereshkova was the trailblazer for women venturing into space but it wasn't an ideal that she had initially aspired to.

After Yuri Gagarin became the first man into space in 1961, the Soviet director of cosmonaut training, Nikolai Kamanin, got news that the USA were training female astronauts for their missions. His response was instant... "we cannot allow that the first woman into space will be an American. This would be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women". This triggered an action plan by the Soviets and approval was given to place five women into the cosmonaut programme. The sole stipulations were, that they had to be:
- Under 30 years of age
- Less than 170 centimetres in height
- Weighed no more than 70 kilograms and
- They had to be parachutists.

Tereshkova was not in the Air Force at the time she applied. She was a textile worker who was also an amateur skydiver and she fit all of the other requirements. After her training, she was placed on a solo mission on Vostok 6 and created history when she was launched into space on 16 June, 1963. Not only did this make her the first woman into space but, hers was a solo mission and, as at May 2023, she remained the only woman to venture there alone. Her spectacular journey saw her spending three days in space and orbiting the Earth 48 times.

There's an old adage that "from little things, big things grow" and Tereshkova became a hero in the Soviet Union, eventually becoming a member of the State Duma, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia. Of the initial five women taken into this programme, Tereshkova is the last surviving member of the group. In all, to this point, the combined Soviet and Russian Federation space programmes have sent six women into space.

In 1983 Sally Ride became the first American, but the third woman, after the Soviets Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982), into space. She spotted a NASA advertisement on the front page of the Sanford Daily in 1977, calling for recruits for their Space Shuttle programme, which also requested female recruits to apply. Sally was one of 8,079 applicants who'd put their hands up for the role. The position was, eventually, whittled down to 35 candidates, of which there were six females.

Ride's impressive resume included a Bachelor of Science and Arts degrees as well as a Master of Science with a strong physics background and impressive physical fitness. She flew into space on the space shuttle Challenger on mission STS-7, helping to deploy two satellites, utilizing a robotic arm in which she assisted with the design. She would enjoy a second mission, STS-41-G, also on the Challenger and, overall, spent 343 hours in space. She would leave NASA in 1987.

In a similar fashion to Valentina Tereshkova and Sally Ride before her, Helen Sharman found her way into the space programme of her country by way of an advertisement. Hers was a radio request that simply stated "Astronauts wanted, no experience necessary". Sharman's eventual selection would go on to become a nationally televised event that aired in November of 1989.

Sharman's venture into space would produce another series of "firsts". In her case she became the first British person (not just woman) into space, the first western European woman into that frontier, the first privately funded woman to do so and the first woman to visit the space station MIR. Her mission was a joint British and Soviet Union venture, that was aimed at fostering stronger relations between the two nations during the closing days of the Cold War. As a consequence, Sharman's selection hinged, not just on her strong background in chemistry, but also her ability to quickly grasp foreign languages. The latter was necessary as the majority of her training was conducted in Moscow.

She was launched into space in May of 1991 alongside the Soviet cosmonauts Anatoly Artsebarksy and Sergei Krikalev and her main missions were to conduct medical and agricultural tests, photograph the British Isles and participate in a radio hook-up with a broad spectrum of British schoolchildren. Her entire mission lasted a total of eight days.

Roberta Bondar became, not only, the first Canadian and neurologist into space, but a national heroine. She was selected as one of the first six members brought together to create the Canadian Astronaut Corps in 1983. Nine years later she was aboard the space shuttle Discovery for Mission STS-42 where she performed a range of experiments on the effects of low gravity on the human body. The research became a vital component in helping NASA prepare an outline for astronauts to be employed in space for longer periods of time.

Bondar received significant recognition for her work as an astronaut including an appointment as a Companion of the Order of Canada, received the Order of Ontario and the NASA Space Flight Medal. In addition, she has been inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, the International Women's Forum Hall of Fame, received a star on Canada's Walk of Fame and has been blessed with more than two dozen honorary degrees.

In July of 1994, aboard the space shuttle Columbia, the 42 year old Chiaki Mukai became the first Asian woman into space and, when she sailed aboard the space shuttle Discovery four years later, she became the first Japanese citizen to venture into that void on two occasions.

She was an assistant professor at the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Japan's oldest establishment of higher learning, the Keio University, when she was selected by Japan's national space agency NASDA (NASDA has since become JAXA). In her two missions, STS-65 and STS-95, her role was to supervise the science missions, covering areas such as space life science, microgravity, radiation biology and fluid science, among others. Her two missions saw her orbit the Earth 370 times, spending a little over 567 hours in space.

There were over 10,000 candidates on file for astronauts for the first intake into France's space programme. From these, six men and Claudie Haignere, the sole female, were selected. She was to become a part of a joint Franco-Russian mission and, as a result, commenced her training at the Yuri Gargarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia in 1994. Two years later she was launched into space alongside two Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soyuz TM-24.

In what was labelled as the "Russian-French Cassiopee" mission, Claudie was stationed on the MIR space station for 16 days conducted numerous experiments in areas as diverse as physiology, and developmental biology as well as fluid physics. In her next mission (1999) she was given command of the re-entry of the Soyuz capsule, becoming the first woman to be both qualified and to perform the feat. In another first for Claudie, she became the first European woman to visit the International Space Station, when she arrived there in 2001. She would retire from the space programme in 2002, at which point she entered politics and became a member of Jean-Pierre Raffarin's government.

In 2006 Yi was chosen as one of the two finalists from a list of female contenders for the Korean Astronaut Programme, however, she was the country's number two choice and was not meant to be the first Korean woman into space. That honour would be bestowed upon the primary astronaut Ko San. The mission she was slated for was a joint affair with the Russian Federal Space Agency and Ko was sent to Moscow to commence training. The Russians soon asked for a replacement as Ko had broken regulations on several occasions in relation to the removal of sensitive materials. Enter Yi So-yeon.

Whilst official papers would record Yi's role as a "guest" participant aboard the Soyuz flight, and during her stay at the International Station, that launched in April of 2008 Yi would conduct a series of experiments, on behalf of the Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), centred around fruit flies and the effects on their behaviour and genomes by the changes in environment and gravitational forces. She grew plants while on the mission, studied her own heart rate and was required to take six photographs of her face each day to see what effects and swelling may have emerged from the changes in gravity.

The drama for Yi was not over as a capsule malfunction meant that the ship endured a ballistic re-entry, subjecting the crew to gravitational forces ten times higher than usual and throwing the capsule some 260 miles off course. The crew survived by Yi did suffer from some spinal recompression. She would resign from the space programme in 2014, after being named by Asian Scientist Magazine as one of the "Fifteen Scientists to Watch".

Unlike many female astronauts, Liu Yang was a career pilot, holding the rank of major in the PLAAF (People's Liberation Army Air Force). After some 1,680 hours of flying experience and two years of training she was selected for the PLA's Astronaut Corps. Her first mission was launched on June 16, 2012, coincidentally, the 49th anniversary of the launch of the first woman Valentina Tereshkova, into space.

She travelled with the crew of the Shenzhou 9 and was a part of the first team to venture onto the experimental Chinese space station, Tiangong 1, where she was to perform a series of medical experiments. Ten later she would travel on board the Shenzhou 14, once again to the Tiangong space station, for a journey that would last six months. This time she was involved with assembly work as part of the station's expansion programme and, in the process, became the second Chinese woman to walk into space.

Samantha was the second woman sent into space by the European Space Agency (ESA), the first being Claudie Haignere, but she was the first Italian. In November of 2014 she was a part of the Soyuz TMA-15M mission that was launched from Kazakhstan and docked at the International Space Station (ISS). Hers was a long duration mission and, in all, she spent 199 days in space, setting a new record for the longest stay in the void by a woman. This would be broken some three years later by Peggy Whitson aboard Expediton 52 to the ISS. Samantha's mission included a series of experiments centred around duration and lunar orbits, but her one disappointment was missing out on a series of spacewalks due to the loss of the mission's EVA equipment.

She would return to the ISS in 2022 as part of Expeditions 67 and 68 and, this time got to do her spacewalk, which lasted a little over seven hours. One of the rather left of centre experiences for her during this mission is that she created the first Tik-Tok video to be broadcast from the ISS. A lover of coffee and a science fiction devotee she installed the first zero-G espresso machine into the ISS and brewed the first cup of coffee in space. She immortalized the event by posting a picture of herself on Twitter, wearing a Starfleet uniform, drinking the coffee and declaring "There's coffee in that nebula". The latter being a reference to Captain Janeway from "Star Trek: Voyager" (TV series 1995-2001).

Rayyanah Barnawi is a scientist whose specialty is cancer stem-cell research and, as the Saudi's second Axiom mission (Ax-2) to the International Space Station (ISS) was to be a scientific one, this gave her a head start in the selection process as the mission's specialist.

She began her initial training in Houston in 2014, her wingsuit training in began in Dubai the same year and by 2022 had completed her centrifuge and hypoxic training to be space ready. In May of 2023 she was launched into space and made history as the first Saudi female to do so. On the mission, which lasted ten days, she conducted experiments in stem cell and tissue reengineering, along with breast cancer stem cell research. An inspiration to many women in her country, she was awarded the Visionary Award of the Middle East Institute in 2024.