STAR CITY. June 7 (Interfax) - Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, has recounted an incident that occurred during her space flight 30 years ago, which she has kept a secret all these years.
"The emergency occurred during the first 24 hours of the flight and I reported it to mission control," she said on Friday at a press conference in Star City, home to Russia's Cosmonaut Training Center.
"The descent program had an error which would have sent the spacecraft up into a higher orbit, if I had not fed new data into the computer," se said.
After landing, Sergei Korolyov, the Soviet rocket engineer and designer, "came up to me and said calling me by my code sign, "Please, let's keep it a secret, my dear Chaika."
"I had kept my promise for 30 years," she said.
Tereshkova flew into space aboard the Vostok-6 spacecraft on June 16 1963.