Sunday, June 16, will mark the 50th anniversary of women in space, according to Space.com. On that day in 1963, Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to go into space. Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space just a couple years earlier.
Tereshkova circled the Earth four dozen times while piloting the Vostok 6 spaceship.
According to editor of collect SPACE.com and space history expert Robert Pearlman, 57 of the 534 people that have been to space are female.
"There have been so many boundaries broken," said Curator Cathy Lewis of the international space programs collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. "We've had a woman commander, woman pilot. We've had an all-women crew that just occurred out of coincidence because it just so happened that they were assembled for their skills. I think the United States is leading the way."
American women didn’t join in until two decades after Tereshkova’s journey. Sally Ride became the first American woman to visit space on June 18, 1983 according to Biography.com.
"NASA took [Tereshkova's flight] to heart, everyone took it to heart, that in order to sustain a space program they were going to have to make it not a program of high performance test pilots and a few selected scientists," Lewis said in an interview with SPACE.com. "They were going to have to do it as a more practical, day-to-day career in space."
Since Ride, NASA has sent 40 woman into orbit. Currently, 12 women work for the agency as astronauts.
According to Lewis, women still have to fight in the astronaut field. Only three out of the 19 women who have trained as Russian or Soviet cosmonauts have made it to space. The last out of those three traveled almost 20 years ago, in 1994.
"While the United States is working to integrate women into the space program over the generations, the Soviet Union really didn't do that," said Lewis. "They didn't make an effort to integrate women in to the program, and it has really only been in the last year that Russia has changed their recruiting requirements for cosmonauts."
Lewis also said the new guidelines for recruitment are like the ones used by NASA and stay away from criteria that is based on gender.
Anna Yuryevna Kikina is one of eight new astronauts recently selected by Russia. She was the only woman, making the amount of active, female Russian astronauts, two.
Women have enjoyed great cosmonaut success in 2013. President Barack Obama will present Ride, who lost a battle with pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012, a posthumous Medal of Freedom award later in the year. This week Wang Yaping will become China’s second female astronaut to head to the country’s orbiting module. Also, Karen Nyberg of NASA is currently living on the International Space Station.
