Sherlock Holmes fans will know of Irene Adler, the woman in “Scandal in Bohemia,” who was smart enough to outwit Holmes and was always afterwards referred by him as ‘The Woman.’ When asked to name his reward for his part in the case he asked for the photograph of Irene. Incidentally pronounced i–ray-ner, with the i as in sit.

Well, when I was an undistinguished young mathematician and scientist in the British Interplanetary Society I had someone I always referred to as ‘The Woman’ and in those days everyone in the groups that I was in knew who I meant. It was Valentina Tereshkova.

I think of her every June 16th and thought that those who don’t know recent history as fact rather than propaganda may be interested in a brief summary of the circumstances before and after her accomplishment.

Last year was the 50th anniversary of the first venture of current humanity into space when Sputnik, the first ever earth satellite, built in Russia, began to orbit the Earth every 96 minutes on October 4th 1957. It had a skin of polished aluminium and was visible from Earth through binoculars. A bird watcher friend of mine could see it without binoculars, but he had extraordinary vision.

It weighed 184 pounds and was emitting beeps on two frequencies that ham radios could pick up, a smart piece of propaganda ensuring publicity from all around the world, at a time when secrecy was a major weapon in military hierarchies in America. At the right time of day you could see it with binoculars as it went through the sky at 18,000 miles an hour, an unheard of speed. I did, and so did all my students at the time.

The Russians helpfully gave out its trajectory and times of visibility, not forgetting to mention specifically that it could also be seen from Little Rock, Arkansas, where America at that time was being treated on TV to the sight of a little black girl being escorted into a high school with a guard of soldiers to protect her from the white segregationists in the land of the free. The recent Jena Six incident and the Katrina affair show how far we have come in that regard. Measure it in centimeters.

America had agreed to the proposal to create an artificial satellite during the International Geophysical Year, and was working on the Vanguard, which weighed a few pounds. Eisenhower wanted to keep the military out of the picture so the military missile rockets were not to be used to put Vanguard into space. He, correctly as it turned out, was suspicious of the Pentagon. He didn’t want to see a militarization of space. Every stage of the non-military work was made public except some of the problems.

The Russians said nothing whatever about what they were doing. Russian scientists could read everything the West had available about rockets, many could read English fluently, but none of the Western scientists bothered to read anything in Russian. Few of them indeed knew any Russian. Even wanting to learn it could cause suspicions in that anti-communist era of hysteria. I remember one Russian scientist saying, “It’s better to say nothing and then do something, than talk all the time and do nothing.” He was a dreaded communist, so he was ignored. Now we are hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to a communist nation. How times change.

One of the German rocket scientists over here actually warned the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in late September 1957, that the Russians were about to put a satellite into space. He was told by our super efficient intelligence agency that the Russians didn’t have the capability. A week later it launched.

Towards the end of WW II in England, I and my friends had experienced the power of the German V2 rockets. Lots of them landed around and about. I had the experience of flying a long distance after one landed quite a way away. As I was going through the air, and thoroughly enjoying it, I must add, I could hear the rush of the rocket coming down. They came down faster than the speed of sound, and their sounds followed them down. There was no defense possible against them.

Both Americans and Russians had taken everything about the German V2 rockets that they could lay their hands on as the War came to an end. And the Americans had managed to get Von Braun the major German rocket scientist, 117 other top scientists, and a few hundred V2 rockets and whole trainloads of spare parts. Nazi sympathies were immediately forgiven to men who were smart enough to help American industry.

So it came as a stunning blow to American prestige when Sputnik, which weighed 184 pounds was there in space and visible in American skies. To get a payload of that weight into space was not even considered possible by the Americans. It was a stunning technological achievement of rocketry brute force, and only a few disagreed with that, mainly some sour grapes American military people.

Scientists all over realized, or said that October 4th was the day on which we entered the Space Age. As I have said in previous posts, I was a member of the British Interplanetary Society in those days. It was a group of physicists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians who believed that the next frontier for humanity was space. Of course it was considered weird by ‘orthodox ’ scientists. Six months before Sputnik went up the Astronomer Royal, an orthodox scientist for sure, said flatly “Space travel is bilge.”

People like Arthur Clarke the science fiction writer, had been certain all along that eventually it would happen. But Americans were chagrined to find that they were not the first or the best, a matter of great importance to the American media and politicians. So complacent were the U.S. authorities that America would be first in space that Sputnik had passed over America twice without being detected before the authorities heard about it from the London Associated Press report. Great security Brownie!

There was tremendous fallout from the incident. The dog Laika orbited the Earth a month after in Sputnik II, which weighed over half a ton. The main focus in the Western press was that the dog could not be brought back alive, not the fact that it was alive for a long time in a 1000 pound plus vehicle in outer space, providing valuable data for the next step, a human in space.

Many Americans, who had never for a moment thought about why the Moon didn’t fall into the Earth, debated fearfully and ignorantly about the possibility of the Sputniks falling out of the sky and annihilating cities.

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, orbited the Earth in 1961, as a young man in his twenties, and then Sergey Korolyov, the head Soviet rocket engineer, suggested that Russia put a woman in space. On February 16,1962, Valentina Tereshkova was selected to join the female cosmonaut corps.

In 1959, Tereshkova had joined the Yaroslavl Air Sports Club and became a skilled amateur parachutist. Inspired by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, she volunteered for the Soviet space program.

Although she had no experience as a pilot at that time, her 126 parachute jump record gained her a tentative position as a cosmonaut trainee in 1961. Five candidates from over four hundred were chosen for a woman-in-space flight; Tereshkova received an Air Force commission and trained for 18 months before becoming chief pilot of the Vostok VI.

Hers was not a privileged life story. She wasn’t a 33rd Degree Mason like all the Americans who landed on the moon. Tereshkova was born on March 6, 1937, in the Volga River village of Maslennikovo. Her father, Vladimir Tereshkov, was a tractor driver who became a sergeant in a tank regiment. He was killed when the Russians invaded Finland, a war incident that many of you may not remember. He was killed on the Finnish front when Valentina was two.

Her mother Elena Tereshkova, was a worker at a cotton mill, and like many current American single moms raised Valentina, her brother Vladimir and her sister Ludmilla in economically trying conditions. Valentina was not able to begin school until she was ten. Remember that.

In 1955, she joined her mother and sister as a loom operator at the mill; meanwhile, she graduated by correspondence courses from the Light Industry Technical School.

She finally achieved her PhD in aeronautical engineering. Not bad for someone who didn’t go to school till she was ten.

When she applied for the cosmonaut program there were over four hundred applicants as I mentioned before, five were finally selected including Tereshkova.

Qualifications included that they be skilled parachutists under 30 years of age, under 170 cm (5 feet 7 inches) tall, and under 70 kg (154 lbs) in weight. Note those qualifications. Do you think the USA could call on more than four hundred women applicants with experience in flying, parachuting and engineering, even now.

Training included weightless flights, isolation tests, centrifuge tests, rocket theory, spacecraft engineering, 120 parachute jumps and pilot training in MiG-15 jet fighters. The group of women did this for months, ending up with a test in November 1962.

Four of them were then commissioned as Junior Lieutenants in the Soviet Air Force. Tereshkova was a leading candidate in the group. Originally it was intended that Tereshkova would launch first in Vostok 5 while Ponomaryova, another of the four, would follow her into orbit in Vostok 6.

However, this flight plan was altered in March 1963. Vostok V would now carry a male cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky flying the first mission, with a woman piloting Vostok VI, both in June 1963.

Tereshkova was chosen to pilot Vostok 6. Note that at this time Tereshkova was ten years younger than the youngest Mercury Seven astronaut, Gordon Cooper. Valery Bykovsky in Vostok V was also under 30. It was frequently remarked in the European press, and among scientists interested in the psychology of space flight that to find Americans of sufficient maturity to withstand the particular problems of space flight, NASA had to choose people decades older than the Russian candidates.

Vostok V was successfully launched on 14 June, watched by Tereshkova. On the morning of 16 June 1963, Tereshkova and her back-up Solovyeva were both dressed in spacesuits and taken to the launch pad by bus. After completing her communication and life support checks, she was sealed inside the Vostok. After a flawless countdown, two hours later Vostok VI launched faultlessly, and Tereshkova became the first woman to fly into space.

Her call sign incidentally was Chaika, which means Seagull. Most Americans would probably plump for Sally Ride as the first woman in space. That was twenty years after Valentina.

Tereshkova orbited the earth 48 times and spent almost three days in space. Those three days were more than the combined times of all American astronauts to that date. She also maintained a flight log and took photographs of the horizon, which were later used to identify aerosol layers within the atmosphere.

She was in radio contact with base and said "I see the horizon. A light blue, a beautiful band. This is the Earth. How beautiful it is! All goes well." Europeans and Soviet TV viewers saw pictures of her with her pencil and logbook floating weightlessly before her smiling face.

Those 48 orbits covered 1,200,000 miles in 70 hours, 50 minutes. She manually directed her space craft to within about 3 miles from the previously launched Vostok V, piloted by cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky as I said before. They were in radio contact.

Tereshkova's flight confirmed other Soviet test results that women had the same resistance as men to the physical and psychological stresses of space.

Upon her return, she and Bykovsky, who landed three hours later, with a solo space record of five days that he still holds, were hailed in Moscow's Red Square. On June 22 at the Kremlin she was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and was decorated by Presidium Chairman Leonid Brezhnev with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star Medal
.
After her triumphant return she was asked how the Soviet Union should thank her for her service to the country. Tereshkova asked the state to search for and publish the location where her father was killed in action.

This was done and a monument is now standing at the site in the town of Lemetti—now on the Russian side of the Russian/Finnish border. Tereshkova has since visited Finland several times.

A symbol of emancipated Soviet feminism, she toured the world as a goodwill ambassador promoting the equality of the sexes in the Soviet Union, receiving a standing ovation at the United Nations.

With Gagarin, she travelled to Cuba in October as a guest of the Cuban Women's Federation, and then went to the International Aeronautical Federation Conference in Mexico.

The no longer weird British Interplanetary Society invited her to London to a banquet and presentation in her honor.

One of the high moments of my life in England was meeting this representative of what women could do when given the chance. I can remember it as if it was yesterday. The hall, as far as I could see was completely filled with men from the fields of science and mathematics. When she came into the hall her energy and confidence shone like a beacon, and every man in the hall spontaneously rose to his feet in an act of homage to the first woman in space.

In November 3, 1963, Tereshkova married another Soviet cosmonaut Colonel Andrian Nikolayev, who had orbited the earth 64 times in 1962 in the Vostok III. Their daughter Yelena Adrianovna Nikolayeva was born on June 8, 1964, and was carefully studied by doctors as the first child from space, because of her parents' space exposure, but no ill effects were found. After her flight, Tereshkova continued as an aerospace engineer in the space program.

It then became politically imperative from a PR point of view that Americans beat the Russians at something obviously scientific or at least technical, which means the same thing to many Americans.

A young and charismatic President chose getting to the Moon. And money and expertise were poured into the project, which eventually succeeded. I remember saying to my group of nerdy friends, “I hope to God they don’t put up an American flag on the Moon to continue this stupid Cold War game.” They did. My bias is clear I hope. I considered it a scientific triumph of humanity, as was Tereskova’s feat, not a piece of nationalistic one upmanship.

Hindsight is 20/20 as we all know. It is clear now that the satellites were not the point of the exercise at all. Nor was space travel. It was a heads up to the American military complex. The Russians were perfectly aware of the total ruthlessness of the American military. They knew that the British/American fire bombing of Dresden, which killed 100,000 people in one night, right in front of the advancing Russian army, was an unavoidably obvious muscle flexing exercise to show the Russian military what we could do, and would do.

The nuclear destruction of another 100,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortly after the Russians declared war on Japan, and during peace negotiations with the Japanese, was just another heads up to the Russian military.

The Russians lived in dread of a pre-emptive nuclear strike from the hysterically anti-communist Americans. The 1000 pound payload of Sputnik II showed the Americans that the Russians now had intercontinental ballistic missile capability, and that Russia was no longer a helpless target. An attack would produce an attack.

Outwardly the whole affair was a PR disaster for the American public, who had always been taught that they were first in everything, and that communists were envious of their prosperity and freedom. Rather like what they were told more recently about the Arabs.

Things weren’t made better when the Vanguard program was accelerated too fast under political pressure from scientific ignoramuses, and the whole world was invited to watch the wonders of American expertise in instrumental miniaturization in science as it was launched on live TV.

The rocket lifted maybe four or five feet off the ground and exploded in front of everybody in the world. The genuinely amazing ability of American scientists to miniaturize instruments was lost in the politically induced fiasco.

Politicians of course used fear to make political capital out of the whole affair. Lyndon Johnson who was then the Senate Majority Leader warned the now hysterical American people and his scientifically ignorant colleagues, that the Russians could now build space stations and emulate a favorite teen age pastime of dropping rocks on cars going by on the underpass, except that it would be bombs not rocks.

Of course the tactic worked. Fear always works in this country if the voice of the messenger is grave or authoritative or perpetually quoted. Another Senator intoned what has since become a common catch phrase, “What is at stake is nothing less than our survival.”

But at the time, the obvious conclusion made by the media in many other countries was not that the Russians could now hit back at the bully, but that the science and mathematics education system of the Soviets was superior to those of the capitalists, as indeed it was.

And it finally dawned on Americans and Britons that they were ignoring half the human race, when it was discovered that half of the thousands of Russian qualified engineers were women. The qualified jet pilot Valentina Tereskova also had a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering. And she wasn’t unusual in that regard. Engineering and science at the highest levels were totally acceptable career paths for girls in Russia.

American engineering at the time was male dominated and seemed to be focused on trivia like the tail fins of cars. One American rocket scientist, Julian Davidson remembers that he was watching TV when the news about Sputnik came and realized that he was watching a commercial about the ingenuity of American science at having developed a new razor for Gillette.

And finally America began to consider raising the educational standard of its students, a matter always previously considered dangerous by its politicians, as it is today. The political spin is always high-toned but the political actions always seem to make it harder for the less than very rich to get an education for their children.

Well, we all woke up for a short time, and pushed ahead with the same modern science that the Russian students were learning. That’s one reason I’m here today. When Sputnik I and II went up and our deplorable (British) condition in mathematics was made obvious, many new programs were set up for the learning of the mathematics discovered since the 17th century invention of the calculus, which was as far as many science students went.

I was asked by Wolsey Hall of Oxford, a premier home study college for degree students, to write three large courses in Modern Mathematics. One was for the students who, within a year were going to find such material in their university entrance exams. Another was for the teachers who had never been exposed to the powerful modern methods, and a third was for parents who would be wondering why junior was learning an algebra in which A x B didn’t always give the same answer as B x A.

People who had no difficulty in realizing that putting on your shoes and then your socks wasn’t the same as putting on your socks and then your shoes, or that first right then first left was different from first left then first right, had no concept that there were whole branches of mathematics in which the order in which you did things mattered a lot.

These courses were advertised in the Times Educational Supplement and used all over. It was because of this published work and a 10,000 student experience as a teacher that I was offered a post as Senior Editor in an American Educational Text Book Publisher.

That’s how I came to be here. Sputnik is a personal matter for me therefore, as is science and mathematics education.

Hindsight as I said before is 20/20. We didn’t enter the Space Age with Sputnik and its competitors. We still haven’t got the international space station fully operational and Sputnik went up 50 years ago. What we have got though are lots of satellites, Arthur C.Clarke’s idea. There are over 6,500 satellites now revolving around the planet, most of them inoperative space debris. Just over 900 are working, and over 500 of those are for communications. Many of course are spy satellites.

So now we have the Information Age instead of the Space Age. NASA’s budget is probably too small now to have manned programs beyond the Moon, or even a permanent space station ON the Moon.

But one consequence of Sputnik you are using now. The Pentagon put its scientists to work to create a computer network that could still function if some of the centers were bombed by the now possible Russian missiles. It was called the Arpanet then. Now it’s called the Internet.

You can have the pleasure of seeing a Google Earth Image photo from outer space of your car in your driveway. Probably makes you feel as safe as it makes me feel.

But the Information Age has not yet arrived for a significant, financially and politically powerful section of the American people. We woke up as a nation educationally for a short time, but now we have been going backwards again because of Christian religious fundamentalism.

People are advocating using the Bible as a science text. Such stupidity does not merit debate, no matter how clever the arguments and deceptions being used. The same fundamentalists regard women as inferior to men, advocate original sin, are paranoid about sex, and consider humans as separate from Nature and appointed master of the planet Earth by some supernatural authority. They are the enemy of planetary and human survival.

Let those of us who value humanity and truth stop backing away every time they wave the Bible at us. There’s no chance of a humane emphasis arising from these people, or a regard for the planet as anything but a resource to mine for raw materials. We can see where that is leading us. Completely verified scientific data is now denied and ignored, unless it fits into a current anti survival political and religious dogma.

In my health articles I have often said, “If you don’t take care of your body, where are you going to live?” The same thing applies to the planet. Too much cleverness, too much absurd and counter survival dogma, and too little wisdom. No thought for future generations, only the next election for the politicians, and quick profits for the already multi-millionaire CEO’s.

As I said in my post of July 4th 2006, about woman and the goddess, it doesn’t work, and hasn’t ever worked. Women automatically think of future generations. It’s time to access their wisdom, even if they have black skins and needed military protection just to go to school in this country, while in others they were encouraged to reach their full potential. As the old proverb goes: “Cherish your enemy, and contemplate him. He holds the secrets of your success.”

Our bigoted, ignorant and implacable enemy is a hydra with many heads, patriarchy, paternalism, cronyism at every level, corruption in government, money as God, competition without cooperation, might is right and the profit motive as the only motives for action.

Not to mention a disgusting habit of assuming moral superiority over others, while many of those in high places are actually practicing the ways they call immoral or have made illegal for others.

And let’s also remember religiously inspired and deliberately cultivated ignorance. The policy of the Catholic hierarchy for centuries in Europe and today towards the most uneducated sections of the human family in Latin America, is a case in point. Learning critical thinking was a no-no.

Contemplating these matters will show the way out of our dilemma, by making us acutely aware of the enemy. I suggest first finding ways of tapping the wisdom of the disregarded half of the human race as a good start. Vive les femmes sages! Vive Tereskova! the unavoidable example of how things could be.