She had flown 22,000 of 29,000 miles around the world when she vanished near Howland Island in 1937. The search that followed was the most expensive in US history at the time.
Valentina Tereshkova orbited Earth 48 times in 1963 in a capsule she could not steer, spending more time in space than every American astronaut combined up to that date.
No American flight school would accept Bessie Coleman, so she learned French and trained in Paris, becoming the first Black woman in the world to hold a pilot's licence in 1921.
