In the late 1950s, a young Soviet textile worker was sneaking away on weekends to jump out of airplanes, hiding her bruised knees from a mother who had no idea. Four years later she was orbiting the Earth, logging more time in space on a single flight than every American astronaut combined. This episode traces how Valentina Tereshkova's biography became her greatest asset: daughter of a tank sergeant killed in the Winter War, an unprivileged factory worker with a parachuting hobby, she was exactly the propaganda symbol Khrushchev wanted after NASA's own rules disqualified the elite female pilots of the Mercury 13.

The flight itself was brutal. Three days of violent space sickness in a metal sphere the size of a phone booth, composed for live state television the entire time, followed by an ejection at 20,000 feet, a barely steerable parachu ...