Around 105 women have flown to space. Out of everyone who has ever left the planet, that’s fewer than 15%. The women on this list are the famous female astronauts who changed that number, one flight at a time, and the reasons they’re famous range from a 1963 solo orbit to a 328-day stay on the International Space Station.
They’re ordered by first flight, so you can read it as a timeline. The firsts table comes first if you only need a quick answer for a school project.
Contents
- Women astronauts firsts: quick reference
- The 15 profiles
- Why so few women have flown
- Artemis and what comes next
Women astronauts firsts: quick reference
| Milestone | Astronaut | Year |
|---|---|---|
| First woman in space | Valentina Tereshkova (USSR) | 1963 |
| First woman to spacewalk | Svetlana Savitskaya (USSR) | 1984 |
| First mother in space | Anna Fisher (USA) | 1984 |
| First American woman in space | Sally Ride | 1983 |
| First American woman to spacewalk | Kathryn Sullivan | 1984 |
| First African American woman in space | Mae Jemison | 1992 |
| First woman to pilot a Space Shuttle | Eileen Collins | 1995 |
| First woman to command a Space Shuttle | Eileen Collins | 1999 |
| First woman to command the ISS | Peggy Whitson | 2007-08 |
| First Chinese woman in space | Liu Yang | 2012 |
| First all-female spacewalk | Christina Koch and Jessica Meir | 2019 |
| First woman to fly around the Moon | Christina Koch | 2026 |
The 15 profiles
1. Valentina Tereshkova
Famous for: the first woman in space.
Tereshkova worked in a textile mill in Yaroslavl and jumped out of planes on weekends. That parachuting hobby is why she got the job. Soviet planners picked five women from hundreds of candidates, and skydiving mattered because Vostok pilots ejected during descent and landed under their own chute.
She flew Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, and orbited Earth 48 times in almost three days. She’s still the only woman to have flown a solo space mission. The next woman wouldn’t follow her for 19 years.
2. Svetlana Savitskaya
Famous for: the first woman to walk in space.
Savitskaya was already a record-setting aerobatic pilot when she flew to the Salyut 7 station on Soyuz T-7 in August 1982, becoming the second woman in space. Two years later, on July 25, 1984, she stepped outside for 3 hours and 35 minutes. She used a hand tool to cut and weld metal samples in open space, which is a harder job than floating around looking pleased.
She beat American women to the spacewalk by less than three months.
3. Sally Ride
Famous for: the first American woman in space.
Ride was a Stanford astrophysics PhD who answered a newspaper ad for astronaut candidates. On STS-7 in June 1983 she was 32 and ran the Challenger’s robotic arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite. At a press conference, someone asked if she’d cry if something went wrong on the job. She said no.
She later served on the investigation boards for both the Challenger and Columbia accidents. After her death in 2012, her obituary named Tam O’Shaughnessy as her partner of 27 years, which made her the first known LGBTQ astronaut.
4. Helen Sharman
Famous for: the first Briton in space.
Sharman was a chemist at a confectionery company when she heard a radio ad that said, roughly, that astronauts wanted. She was one of about 13,000 applicants for Project Juno. In May 1991 she launched on Soyuz TM-12 and spent eight days at the Mir space station.
She wasn’t a career astronaut or a military pilot. That’s the detail worth remembering: the selection process picked a working scientist off the street.
5. Roberta Bondar
Famous for: Canada’s first woman in space and the first neurologist to fly.
Bondar’s January 1992 flight on Discovery (STS-42) was built around her field. She studied how weightlessness changes the brain and the inner ear, which is why her mission carried experiments on balance and vision. She’s also a serious photographer, and she turned that skill on Earth from orbit and on landscapes afterward.
6. Mae Jemison
Famous for: the first African American woman in space.
Jemison was a physician who had served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia before NASA picked her in 1987. She flew on Endeavour (STS-47) in September 1992 and carried a photo of Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman to hold a pilot’s license, plus an Alvin Ailey dance poster.
Watching Nichelle Nichols as Uhura on Star Trek helped push her toward the astronaut corps, and in 1993 she returned the favor by appearing in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She was the first real astronaut to do it.
7. Chiaki Mukai
Famous for: the first Japanese woman in space.
Mukai was a cardiovascular surgeon when she flew on Columbia (STS-65) in July 1994. Her mission was a life-sciences flight, and she studied how the heart and circulation adapt to microgravity. She flew again in 1998 on STS-95, the mission that carried John Glenn back to space at 77. Between the two flights she logged about 23 days in orbit.
8. Eileen Collins
Famous for: the first woman to pilot and then command a Space Shuttle.
Collins was an Air Force test pilot who grew up watching planes at an airfield in Elmira, New York. On STS-63 in February 1995 she flew Discovery to within about 37 feet of the Mir space station, a precision-flying test run for later docking missions.
In 1999 she commanded STS-93 and deployed the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Members of the Mercury 13 (more on them below) attended that launch as her guests. In 2005 she commanded STS-114, the shuttle’s return to flight after the Columbia disaster. She flew four missions in total.
9. Peggy Whitson
Famous for: the first woman to command the ISS, and the record for most time in space by an American.
Whitson grew up on a farm in Iowa and trained as a biochemist. NASA says she logged 665 days in space across three long-duration missions, the most of any American at the time of her retirement. Her list of records is long: first woman to command the station, and the first to do it twice (Expedition 51 in 2017). She’s also done 10 spacewalks totaling 60 hours and 21 minutes, the most by any woman.
She returned in 2017 at 57, the oldest woman to fly at that point. In 2023 she commanded Axiom Mission 2, a private flight to the station, which made her the first woman to command a commercial crew mission.
10. Anousheh Ansari
Famous for: the first woman to fly as a private space explorer.
Ansari was a telecom entrepreneur born in Iran who bought her seat on a Soyuz, reportedly for around $20 million. She launched on Soyuz TMA-9 in September 2006 and spent about ten days on the ISS running experiments for the European Space Agency. She was the first Iranian in space, and the first Muslim woman.
Her family also funded the Ansari XPRIZE, which pushed private companies toward building reusable suborbital spacecraft.
11. Liu Yang
Famous for: the first Chinese woman in space.
Liu was a People’s Liberation Army Air Force pilot with flying hours behind her when she launched on Shenzhou-9 on June 16, 2012. That’s the same calendar date as Tereshkova’s flight, 49 years later. She spent 13 days in orbit and docked with the Tiangong-1 station. Wang Yaping followed in 2013 and became the first Chinese woman to spacewalk in 2021, so China now has its own line of women to point to.
12. Samantha Cristoforetti
Famous for: a 199-day mission and the first European woman to command the ISS.
Cristoforetti was an Italian Air Force fighter pilot who launched in November 2014 for a 199-day stay. At the time, that was the longest single spaceflight by a woman. She drank the first espresso brewed in space from a purpose-built machine, and she wore a Star Trek uniform to do it.
On her second mission in 2022 she took command of the station, a first for a European woman.
13. Christina Koch
Famous for: 328 consecutive days in space and the first all-female spacewalk.
Koch wintered at the South Pole before NASA selected her in 2013. She launched in March 2019 and returned in February 2020 after 328 days, the longest single spaceflight by a woman, passing Whitson’s 288. If you’re searching for the Christina Koch record, that’s it.
On October 18, 2019, she and Jessica Meir stepped out for the first spacewalk with an all-female crew. The first attempt that spring was scrapped partly because only one medium-sized spacesuit torso was ready on the station. Koch then flew on Artemis II in April 2026, which made her the first woman to travel around the Moon.
14. Wally Funk
Famous for: waiting 60 years to reach space.
In 1961 Funk, then 22, passed the same physical tests given to Mercury astronauts. She was one of 13 women, now called the Mercury 13, to do it. NASA never had a women’s program, and none of them flew with the agency. Funk spent decades as a flight instructor and accident investigator.
On July 20, 2021, she flew on Blue Origin’s New Shepard at 82, the oldest person to reach space at that time. The flight lasted about ten minutes. She’d wanted it for six decades.
15. Sian Proctor
Famous for: the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft.
Proctor grew up in Guam, where her father worked at a NASA tracking station during Apollo. She was a geoscience professor who’d made the final cut for NASA’s astronaut class in 2009 and didn’t get picked. In September 2021 she flew as pilot of SpaceX’s Inspiration4, the first all-civilian orbital flight, after winning a seat in a contest for entrepreneurs.
The mission lasted three days. She flew higher than the ISS orbit, at about 575 km.
Why so few women have flown
For its first 15 years, NASA drew astronauts mostly from military jet test pilots, and the military didn’t let women into those jobs. The 1978 class changed that, adding six women: Ride, Fisher, Sullivan, Lucid, Resnik and Seddon. The Soviet Union flew Tereshkova, then went 19 years before sending another woman. The full roster of Russian female cosmonauts shows who followed.
Pipelines still matter. Astronaut classes are built from applicants, and women have been a minority of those pools in the engineering, military and test-flight careers that feed them. NASA’s list of women who have flown on the station shows how the ISS era helped: long-duration missions gave women more chances to set records that don’t depend on a pilot’s seat.
Other women belong in this conversation too: Shannon Lucid spent 188 days on Mir in 1996, and Jessica Meir shared that October 2019 spacewalk with Koch. Fifteen profiles can’t hold everyone.
Artemis and what comes next
NASA has said the Artemis program will land the first woman on the Moon, and Artemis II was the first step. Koch’s flight in April 2026 took her around the far side of the Moon on a crewed flyby, the first time any woman has traveled that far from Earth. The next crewed landing is expected to put a woman on the lunar surface.
Commercial flights have changed the picture too. Funk, Proctor and Ansari all got to space on routes that didn’t exist when Tereshkova flew. Shorter, cheaper trips don’t replace a space agency’s long-duration missions, but they widen the pool of women who’ve seen Earth from above.
The women astronauts on this list set records across six decades and many countries. The number is still small, and the next entry on the list is probably in training now.
