When the Russian girl Valentina Tereshkova, quite without 
pilot training, went into orbit on June 16, 1963, her action, as 
reacted to in the press and other media, was a kind of defacing 
of the images of the male astronauts, especially the Americans. 
Shunning the expertise of American astronauts, all of whom 
were qualified test pilots, the Russians don’t seem to feel that 
space travel is related enough to the airplane to require a 
pilot’s “wings.” Since our culture forbids the sending of a 
woman into orbit, our only repartee would have been to launch 
into orbit a group of space children, to indicate that it is, after 
all, child’s play.

     The first sputnik or “little fellow-traveller” was a witty 
taunting of the capitalist world by means of a new kind of 
technological image or icon, for which a group of children in 
orbit might yet be a telling retort. Plainly, the first lady